Instructors at San Bernardino Valley and Crafton Hills colleges are accusing the San Bernardino Community College District of wanting to double the work they’re doing — for the same amount of pay.
“In the (2022-23) fall semester, early on, some of our faculty were told by a new administrator that they would teach two classes, each of which has a separate section number — in other words, it’s reported to the state as two classes — but they would get paid for one,” said Edward Gomez, president of the SBCCD Teachers Association.
After months of fruitless discussions between the college district and the union, the SBCCDTA submitted a request with the chancellor’s office to take the case to arbitration on Tuesday, July 18.
The college district declined to comment on Gomez’s allegations.
“The district and SBCCDTA are currently engaged in their mutually negotiated dispute resolution process, as set forth in their collective bargaining agreement,” district spokesperson Angel Rodriguez wrote in an email on Tuesday. “Beyond that, because this case involves an ongoing matter related to personnel, as well as a pending hearing process, it would not be appropriate for the district to publicly comment further.”
The California Community Colleges system, which coordinates the system of 116 colleges, and which taught an estimated 1.9 million students in the 2020-21 school year, is staying out of the dispute.
“Workload is established in local collective bargaining agreements, which the Chancellor’s Office does not have any involvement with,” Melissa Villarin, spokesperson for Chancellor Sonya Christian, wrote in an email.
SBCCD includes Valley College in San Bernardino and Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa. According to Gomez, science teachers at Valley College were told they would be teaching additional sessions of their classes, while some teachers at Crafton Hills had many more students added to their classrooms.
“Some of these classes are classes in which there are chemicals, fire, there’s all types of safety issues for the students, the faculty, the staff,” Gomez said.
According to 2022-2025 collective bargaining agreement between the district and the union, full-time instructional faculty have 175 workdays each year, including 166 days of scheduled classes and two flexible days each academic year.
Previously, Gomez was expected to teach five classes, each of which included three hours of lecture time each week. Now, that amount of classroom time — and grading papers and all of the other work associated with teaching a class — has doubled, he said.
“What they’re saying is you’re now going to get History 100, section one and section two, and it’s only going to count as one (section),” Gomez said.
Other colleges compensate instructors for higher workloads, he said, including higher pay or other considerations.
District representatives wouldn’t discuss the details of the disagreement for this story, but according to Gomez, they’ve previously pointed to the collective bargaining agreement not explicitly forbidding them from requiring more work for the same pay from instructors.
” ‘Where is it in the contract that we can’t do that?’ ” Gomez quoted. District administrators at each college are “taking the stance that anything that’s not explicitly in the contract is essentially fair game for the district to do,” he said.
The union’s grievance procedure is laid out in the collective bargaining agreement. Going to an outside arbiter means the union’s complaints have already gone through four previous steps in the process and been heard by multiple high-ranking officials at the colleges and district, including the presidents at Valley and Crafton Hills.
Going to an arbiter is the last step in the grievance process laid out in the agreement. A teachers strike is not on the table, as it’s specifically prohibited in the agreement.
But that doesn’t mean students won’t be impacted by the grievance.
“I’ve had people who’ve taken weeks off for their mental health, because the stress of this is so bad,” Gomez said.
And other teachers are looking for jobs elsewhere, he said.
“As a matter of fact, I just received a notice from an additional one that she will do one more class under this dean and either retire early or do early retirement and only teach one class here or there, but she’s very upset at San Bernardino Valley College,” Gomez said.
If the arbiter sides with the colleges, Gomez said he expects a “mass exodus” of instructors.
“I don’t see why people would stay in that case,” he said. “There are many other places to go.”
