June 16, 2020 - Special Meeting

The notes were approved

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APBT Statement of Support to Open Child Development Center Under New COVID19 Regulations

The members approved the following statement of support.

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Bookstore and Dining Services - Next Steps

Grey began by briefly recapping the main points of the last meeting being that the self-funded departments have been seriously impacted by Covid19 closures. The most impacted is dining services as this department has no incoming revenue but continue to accrue expenses. Gannon and Grey have discussed the fiscal impact to the both departments and what options are available to the college. Chancellor Miner and the college senior staff have been vocal in their support of doing everything possible to support all FHDA employees, including those who are not in the general fund.

Bookstore

Following on from the discussion from last week’s meeting, the bookstore has been experiencing a steep decline in revenue over the past 6 years. Historically the textbook industry has ruled supreme by setting prices, which used to result in 80% of bookstore revenues being generated from textbooks sales The move to Open Educational Resources (OER) textbooks and online booksellers has seriously impacted sales. Most colleges have outsourced bookstores to third party vendors. After much discussion, the recommendation is to consider outsourcing the De Anza bookstore. The start of this process would be to do a request for proposal (RFP) for outside vendors to essentially run the bookstore. Certain requests/requirements could be incorporated into the PFR such as requesting the vendor offer our staff first right of employment and continuing to offer student employment. There would be a working group of staff, faculty, students and procurement experts to work on the project. The team discussed the ramifications of such a proposal and agreed that the college should investigate all options to ensure the survival of an on-campus bookstore.

Dining Services

Dining services do not have any revenue coming in.  With dining services, the college recognizes that it cannot be business as usual and that previous staffing and service levels cannot be maintained in the near future. After much difficult discussion the least-worst proposal is to layoff 6 food services staff for lack of work and funds as of September 2, 2020 with the hope that once the college is fully open again, perhaps in January 2021, when could reemploy the staff under reemployment rights in their contract.  The date of September 2, 2020 will allow for these staff to be paid their regular salary through to September 2, and they will be eligible for benefits (Health Care) through the end of September 2020. Although a very difficult decision, these employees will be eligible for unemployment benefits under the covid19 provisions. There are two vacant positions that will not be laid off, as they are not incurring any expenses. These two positions are the director and division administrative assistant. Staff would get a 75-day notice. One staff member may consider retirement.  De Anza is considered a commuter campus as there are no dormitories. All commuter campus’ dining services are affected. Residential campuses are also affected due to less students being allowed to live in the housing. Dining services would need a guaranteed food service of at least 1,600 customers per day to break even. All outside vendors (Le Café Unamas, Jerad’s coffee) are closed. Grey acknowledged that no one wants to support such a proposal but that in difficult times difficult decisions still have to be made. The team agreed to support the statement that based on the current budget situation, there was no better option available. 

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Participatory Governance - Continued

Following on from last week's discussion and from interim president Espinosa-Pieb's announcement that the college was reevaluating the shared governance structure in order to make improvements to the equity goals of the campus. This item is on Thursday's College Council meeting agenda.

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Best Practices for Student Voices in Shared Governance

2019/20 Student Trustee Kolar presented the document and asked the members for their support. The team thanked Trustee Kolar for her thoughtful presentation and Martin Varela volunteered to be the APBT mentor.

Present: Chand, Fritz, Gerard, Gore, Grey, Harada, Kolar (Student Trustee), Grace Lim (DASB) Varela, Yi-Baker. Notes Gibson.