Report to YCCD Board of Trustees

October 13, 2010

Good Afternoon – My name is Nancy Bull and I’m the Classified Senate President this year. I’m so appreciative of the opportunity to give this report.

As you know, one of the main functions of a classified senate is to play a role in Participatory Governance. Our contributions to this process are many and on-going.

The Classified Senate has representation on College Council which is the college’s primary participatory governance body.

We also have representation on all standing college committees, the SLO Work Group, screening committees and we’re fully represented on all the college’s accreditation committees.

Like the academic and student senates, we have a constitution and by-laws. It’s one of our agenda items this year to review and update those documents.

Thanks to the hard work of some of our members this summer, we’re pleased to announce that the Classified Senate webpage is now fully functional.

The classified senate has a scholarship fund. One of our projects has been to increase its funding, at which we’ve been quite successful, and it’s our continuing goal to award two scholarships each year.

We’re happy to report that we were able to implement our process for mentoring new employees over the summer and this fall as some of our staffing vacancies were filled.

When Dr. Smith came to Columbia as our president, she encouraged the Classified Senate, as part of its role in Participatory Governance, to develop and implement Classified Staff Hiring Priorities and Procedures.

This was a totally new concept to us but we embraced it, formed a large task force and worked diligently for almost a year in developing the process. We’re particularly proud of our achievement since very few classified senates in California have Hiring Priorities and Procedures. Our senate received help from a couple of colleges when we started developing our hiring priorities/procedures, and over the summer we, in turn, were able to share our documents with two other groups who are interested in developing their own hiring priorities and procedures. Each year, the documents are reviewed and updated as necessary. We’ll be implementing this process for the 3rd year in a row this fall. In fact, our hiring priorities committee held their first meeting this afternoon.

The support we’ve received from Dr. Smith, along with the “Model Classified Senate” award we received in 2009 really encouraged us to be an even greater asset to the college. Additionally, the accreditation self study has strengthened, even more, our understanding that the role of Classified Senate in Participatory Governance, as well as its other activities, is truly an integral part of the successful operation and accountability of the college. The classified senate is proud of its achievements and again, we thank you for this time to share them with you.