At Solano, the Academic Senate made finding out more about the connection to budget and planning one of its objectives for the year. We had asked the Deans at the Joint Meeting with Educational Administrators about the connection between Program Review and budget. There was no answer. The Deans were just as frustrated as we were. The College was dinged back in 2005 for planning without implementing. It was also reported to us that we let our budget lead the college rather than the other way around, a bit like the tail wagging the dog.
For some of you the idea of an integrated evaluation, planning and budgeting plan is a foreign thing, something that we've never quite had a Solano College. I know that when Dr. Steinback, Tracy Schneider and I went to the ASCCC Accreditation Institute a few weeks ago, the last thing I thought I'd come back with was a strong desire to figure out our planning and budget processes, or the lack thereof. But that's exactly what happened. It seems that a lack of Budget Planning is a problem in many institutions. One of the session panels was all about it. I watched as Fresno City College, Cuesta College and College of Marin all presented their budget planning flowcharts. I knew that at Solano we had no such planning but when I got back to campus I started digging, digging for evidence that we had a PLAN. Many of you already know that my search was in vain.
At our College, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think that we "get" Student Learning Outcomes (SLO). I mean, we've begrudgingly come to the realization that we should spend time talking about what we expect our students to learn (that we actually learn something ourselves as we dialogue with our colleagues about it) and that it is only fair to our students that we spell out those expectations. We still have a little way to go, but we are well on our way. We also do Program Review pretty well. In the best of worlds it serves primarily as an internal mechanism to gauge our own progress and to set goals while in the worst of worlds it is an exercise in futility. We can also say that somehow our resources are allocated. We have paper, pens, computers and such, but the reality is that our SLOs, our Program Review (and not to mention 3 year plans) and our Budge do not intersect. They should.
What I did find was that while we do have a very well articulated Strategic Planning Process (remember, these are the cross-divisional initiatives that are connected to our strategic goals and Educational Master Plan [EMP]) we don't have an effective operational planning process. Faculty have submitted Strategic Proposals to Review Groups, Shared Governance has ranked the seven proposals we received and sent them on to FaBPAC. FaBPAC has now reviewed these proposals and has sent its recommendations on to the Superintendent/President. While it would be safe to say that not everyone is totally familiar with this process, it is safe to say that everyone has had it presented to them.
What I also found was a report embedded in the Intranet called "Recommended Processes for Solano Community College's Integrated Evaluation, Planning, & Budgeting" (aka Integrated Plan). The beauty of this plan is that it is an organic document that comes from within our processes and it meets our needs. But first, it is important to state that the ACCJC visiting team was not wild about this Integrated Plan because faculty and staff weren't familiar with it and the flowchart wasn't clear. It makes sense that faculty wasn't familiar with it because it was created in 2004, the ACCJC visit was in 2005 and there wasn't any training on how the process works!
What has happened since discovering these documents is that Rob Simas, Tracy Schneider, Ruth Fuller, most recently Dave Redfield and I have done our best to work on the Integrated Plan to:
- Simplify the flowchart
- Simplify the language used to talk about the process
- Update the process to include SLOs and the Strategic Proposal Process
- Create a manual to explain how the process works
Here are the documents that we've been using and working on:
The Strategic Proposal Process:
SCC Integrated Evaluation, Planning and Budgeting Process (2004)
Please keep in mind that the Process Review and Evaluation Team (PERT), that's Rob, Tracy, Ruth, Dave and I, are working on the Integrated Plan and the process is still not fully realized. The goal is to be responsive to Recommendations 2 and 3 of the Show Cause Report.
Part of the goal, as well, is to keep the campus community informed of the Integrated Plan. I've given presentations on it to the Academic Senate (02/02/09 and 02/23/09), the Faculty Association (02/10/09), Shared Governance Council (02/11/09), FaBPAC (02/25/09) and a Campus Informational Meeting (2/19/09). We'll keep you updated as we move forward.
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