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Dante Morelli
The 2022-23 academic year was a whirlwind. It was busy and packed with elections, a beautiful Commencement, contract negotiations, collaborating with fellow unions on various programs and responding to member concerns about the future health and vitality of our union. Elections and FA involvement First and foremost, thank you! It is an honor to have our leadership team re-elected to serve the FA membership. We thank the membership for their continued support. We also thank all of the members who were nominated and ran for officer positions, NYSUT/AFT delegates and Executive Council representatives. We like that we have several new names on our EC list this year as well. One key measure of a healthy, strong union is its membership’s commitment to union activism, leadership and service—and as Tom Flesher notes at the bottom of his article in this issue, we encourage you to reach out by indicating in what ways you might be interested in becoming more involved. You can jump right to our FA Committees and Activities Interest Assessment and let us know what your interests are right now. We emphasize member involvement because everything we do ultimately benefits our students. One of the best highlights of the year was seeing our students participate in the May Commencement exercises. Listening to our students’ stories, I always find their narratives to be moving and inspiring. Commencement serves as a great reminder of the important work we perform as educators. Contract work continues As I stated in a message I sent to the membership, we are edging ever closer to a fair contract. We have been meeting with college administration and county representatives regularly throughout the spring semester. At this point, we do not have a timeline, but our sincere wish would be to have a proposal in place by the start of the 2023-24 academic year. Since we’ve been out of contract since last August and our negotiations team has been working for a year on this, we feel that would be only fair for our members. Please watch your email over the summer in the event that we will need to call a general membership meeting regarding the contract; update your email and contact information with Anita so you do not miss out.
Professional development: Ongoing collaborations The FA had an especially busy year with various professional development opportunities available to our members. We currently have over 30 FA and FA-related committees and positions at the college through which, each year, we have nearly 100 members making active, engaged contributions to the life of our union and the life of the college. This includes members on our eight contractual committees, seven committees called into being in our FA Constitution & Bylaws, our seven ad hoc committees, nine additional FA positions that do integral work for our union and—of course—our 41-member Executive Council which meets once a month to set policy and address our member concerns. Below are a few members I’d like to highlight, though, for special appreciation of their above and beyond contributions this year:
On April 20, with the Guild of Administrative Officers we hosted a wonderful, well attended Spring Fling—you can view event photos from our dear friend Victoria Pendzick here—during which we celebrated our recent retirees and our four FA Member Excellence Award winners. I strongly encourage you to read each of these member’s profiles in this issue:
I also would like to congratulate the following FA members who were recognized on May 5 at the governance awards luncheon for receiving an SCCC Governance Award from 2020 to 2022:
And congratulations to our members who received a SUNY Chancellor’s Award between 2020 to 2022:
Finally, in addition to all of our active, wonderful members, I extend our appreciation to the Guild of Administrative Officers for their contributions to several of our initiatives. We look forward to more collaborative work in the upcoming academic years, as we feel it is important for the three unions at SCCC to work closely together for the betterment of the institution. Member concerns about our future Despite our diligent efforts and solid contributions to the college’s success, we still find ourselves continuously fighting for desperately needed full-time faculty lines. As we look toward the 2023-24 academic year, we will be a membership of less than 400 full-time members. We know that our adjuncts do great work; we know that while they are at SCCC part time, their hearts are in the work full time. And we are proud of the fact that more than 50% of full-time lines over the past half decade or so have been filled by our adjunct members. But we also know that research supports our belief that more full-time faculty leads to increased student success. Unfortunately, we are disappointed in the college’s administrative reorganization unveiled in the spring, as it contributed to the ongoing decline in full-time classroom faculty. We recently conducted screenings for candidates for Suffolk County Executive and the 18 Suffolk County Legislature positions and told all of the candidates about our continuing loss of full-time lines. At the Legislature’s June 21 general meeting, when the college budget passed by a vote of 15-0, Legislator Tom Donnelly asked college administration about the decreasing full-time lines. This is important, as we will continue to engage our county and state elected representatives on these critical issues that impact our membership. In fact, on June 26 we met with NYSUT President Melinda Person, NYSUT Legislative Representative Jim Larson and NYSUT Regional Director Peter Verdon as well as our Labor Relations Specialist Damon Levenstien to discuss exactly these issues and what our statewide parent union can do to support our efforts. Our work continues Over the summer and heading into the fall semester, our #1 priority is to present a fair contract to the membership. We have also begun strategic planning and budgeting for the upcoming year, which includes addressing important member issues such as fixing the Tier 6 retirement plan, continuing work on constituent concerns, campaigning for more full-time lines, a renewed VOTE-COPE drive and an expansion of our JEDI Institute, Take a Look at Teaching program and Professors on Wheels program. In addition, members of the FA leadership team are planning to conduct a listening tour. We ask that you please let your EC rep know what days and times will work best for you to meet with FA leadership. We prefer to meet in person and will travel to all three campuses, but we will also accommodate any need to meet via Zoom as a backup plan. It was a very busy academic year. We are lucky to live on Long Island where the summers can be beautiful. Take some time to enjoy the resources our communities have to offer and stay safe. |
