As the college’s credentialing handbook and Beacon liaison handbook have been revised over the past few years, there seem to be a few misunderstandings about the FA’s positions regarding these documents, so this article provides some union perspective. As always, we welcome member concerns and questions.

Members have been sharing questions and concerns with us about both the Beacon liaison program and the credentialing handbook. As these materials have now been distributed by administration and we continue to engage in conversations with our members, we feel it’s useful to clarify some important points about these projects and the FA’s role in contributing to them.

Some Beacon context

After the previous Vice President for Academic Affairs left SCCC, the Beacon liaison program (formerly Beacon mentoring program) was put on hiatus so it could be restructured to be fairer and more equitable to our members doing the liaison work.

Last summer, the FA established a labor-management committee (LMC) to address the work responsibilities of and compensation for Beacon liaisons. In addition, the FA established a Beacon working group comprised of our LMC members as well as two Beacon liaisons to ensure their experiences were part of our conversations. Our initial meeting was August 14, 2024, and we have been working diligently to get the Beacon liaison program reinstated by our target deadline of fall 2025.

The FA has worked hard on revising and updating the Beacon liaison handbook, which had to be completed before we could argue for appropriate compensation. As is typical of any labor-management negotiations, there’s always some give and take. Administration came back to the table with their revisions, the FA pushed to get core elements of faculty oversight back into the handbook and administration to their credit agreed and reinstated those.

The resulting document reflects the best compromise we could achieve, and the same holds true for the associated memo of agreement (MOA) for compensation of Beacon liaisons.

Some credentialing context

The idea for the credentialing handbook dates to spring 2023 when administration determined there was a need for documentation of hiring credentials to improve collegewide consistency. The previous Vice President for Academic Affairs, Liesl Jones, was involved and originally the credentials were being documented on a course-by-course model; a draft was distributed to academic chairs at that time. However, after Dr. Jones left the instititution in fall 2023, the focus changed to making the credentials discipline based. The FA has been involved in this process throughout since there is negotiated language documenting hiring credentials.

Mythbusting

The following reflects some of the questions and concerns we are hearing from individual members as well as the FA’s response. While we’re referring to this is “mythbusting,” these aren’t all myths, of course; some are simply things that have been misinterpreted or misunderstood and our primary goal here is to help our membership better understand their union’s position on each.

• When it comes to Beacon, the FA’s only purview is compensation; all things academic belong to governance or to academic departments.
  
  Our contract in Article IV Section I outlines that administration has purview over Beacon teacher credentialing, academic departments in consultation with the VPAA have purview over course approval and the FA has purview over the liaison program (referred to as mentors in the contract). The liaison program is what enables our members to have a direct connection with Beacon teachers and help ensure they are using our course syllabi, college-related materials and assessment tools and processes. Our contract states
  

  1. The course’s instructional content will be delivered by a high school teacher whose academic qualifications are judged by the College to be comparable to those of the college faculty teaching the course.
  
  2. The appropriate academic discipline/department will consult with the Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs as to which existing College courses are appropriate to be offered in a dual credit program.
  
  3. A full-time Association faculty in the appropriate discipline will be assigned as the faculty mentor. The faculty mentor is the individual primarily responsible for activities such as the orientation of the high school teacher, review of all instructional materials, course outlines and examinations….
  
  7. No full-time faculty member shall be required to serve as a dual credit faculty. Full-time faculty may volunteer for a dual credit assignment. If no full-time faculty member volunteers, the College reserves the right to assign an adjunct to perform the assignment.
  

• The FA should not have collaborated on the Beacon liaison handbook. By collaborating with administration, the FA is enabling this program. The FA should have only worked out the MOA about compensation; in fact, the FA should have held off on the MOA since we’re in contract negotiations next year.
  
  Because dual credit is in our contract, the FA is obligated to work out the labor and associated compensation with administration. The Beacon liaison handbook needed to be developed because we would not have been able to argue for what’s fair and reasonable compensation without first knowing what liaisons are being tasked with.
  
  We did not wait until the upcoming round of negotiations because our members have been urging us—quite impatiently, in some cases—to get the liaison program reinstated so our own members can collaborate with Beacon teachers and help them understand how our courses work. The liaison handbook better details what is expected of our liaisons, and we worked hard to make workload reasonable for the associated contact hours of compensation (keeping in mind that one contact hour equates to 2 ½ hours of work per week), including removing the mandatory monthly physical site visits and professional development requirements.
  
  
• FA liaisons should conduct observations of Beacon teachers; it’s the only way we can know what they are really doing in their classrooms.
  
  We cannot do this. High school teachers have their own contracts and contractual protections, and faculty are prohibited from holding supervisory roles. Because of this, the FA collaborated with administration to integrate assessments into Beacon courses. While liaisons are prohibited from conducting observations, they can and will be conducting assessments for any courses that are also being assessed at the college. In this way, we will be able to collect data to see how Beacon students are performing in relation to SCCC students, then the liaisons can communicate those results back to the high school teachers.
  
  
• If Beacon teachers are teaching our classes, they are therefore adjuncts and should be subject to all rules that apply to adjunct faculty. Any Beacon teacher who is credentialed to teach one course will be automatically credentialed to teach anything in the discipline.

Beacon teachers are not adjunct faculty members. They work at the high school and are paid by the high school, not by SCCC. Beacon teachers are certified on a course-by-course basis. This is also how our adjunct colleagues at SCCC are certified. A Beacon teacher is not certified to teach any course in a discipline once they are certified to teach a single course.


• The credentialing manual is problematic because it creates all these alternative credentials, and the hiring standard has to be a straight master’s degree in the discipline. Beacon teachers should also have 18 graduate credits in their discipline. Anything less than that is devaluing our profession, and the FA should fight against this.
  
  The 18 graduate credits reflect a general rule of thumb that has been used over the years but is not an official hiring requirement. There is a memo of agreement (MOA) that establishes hiring provisions effective since March 29, 1982, which states in part that
  

  2. The usual minimum education requirement for appointment to the faculty of the College is a Masters Degree [sic] in the subject or area of an individual’s teaching or professional assignment.
  
  3. The College recognizes that there are other attributes and qualifications for teaching and professional positions in addition to possession of educational credentials. In rare instances, therefore, exceptions may be made to the minimum educational requirement, and individuals might be appointed who have other unusual qualifications.

  Members should know that not all past and current faculty at SCCC hold a master’s in their discipline. This is true of both our full-time and our adjunct colleagues. Exceptions have been made in a range of academic departments—not just vocationally focused departments—on all three campuses over the decades. To argue that those colleagues are any less valuable to our institution is unfair and, we would suggest, offensive.
  
  Some have suggested that just because these exceptions have been made in the past, it doesn’t mean administration should be allowed to continue to have such flexibility in hiring. This too is a problematic position. First, past precedent is a core legal concept and, second, the underlying assumption is that the system is necessarily broken—and we know that not everyone concurs with that.

Please continue to bring questions and concerns to the FA so we can keep trying to make sure we are clear on these critical issues and work toward the best solutions we can develop together.