Superintendent shakes up tech study group

Following a contentious process to develop a campus-wide technology plan Southwestern College Interim Superintendent Denise Whittaker, announced her decision to kill the current version of the plan and shut down the workgroup charged with developing it.

"I am recommending we suspend technology plan Workgroup Six," she said. "I will assign a committee to work through the process by March."

Like the first workgroup, this committee will consist of classified employees, faculty members, and administrative personnel. Its task is to develop the school's technology plan, as directed by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).

Recommendation 6 is necessary to preserve the college's accreditation status. March 15 is the deadline to submit the report.

Committee member Larry Lambert, SWC online instructional support specialist, said disorganization and unilateral decision-making led most of the members of the group to officially pull their names from the plan.

"We started late," Lambert said. "We met without any regular schedule, sometimes with a day notice or less. We seldom, if ever, received minutes. The more we tried to take the plan in other directions, following other philosophies, the more resistance we got from Nick Alioto.

And none of our objections went on the record. We got to the point where we thought this was the only way we could let them know how serious we felt about it."

Caree Lesh, an SWC counselor, said she knew this would leave the plan without any support from two of the school's major constituency groups.

"The faculty and classified staff on this workgroup really wanted a good technology plan for this campus," she said. "They felt that we had been lacking one and that this did not represent a good plan with specific details or any real vision for the future, and people didn't want their names associated with that."

Ron Vess, co-chair of the Academic Oversight Committee (AOC), said he understood why the members of the group felt the way they did.

"If I said you were part of my team, then went ahead and did what I wanted and then announced that we did this, you'd say, ‘Wait a minute. I didn't do anything,'" he said. "That's pretty much why the workgroup had said they didn't want their names on that document."

Lambert described the plan as not having any meat to it.

"It has a lot of we-will-do's and we-plan-on-doing, but it doesn't have anything that's really concrete," he said.

"It only had one objective. In my opinion, this plan was only put together to appease accreditation and to slide our way through. I don't think it has any kind of substance at all."

Chris Martinez of office support services also said he was not happy with the plan.

"It should have more support," he said. "I want to make sure

there is equal representation of all classified, instructors, and administrators on that plan. If we're talking about shared governance, then everyone has to be represented."

Tom Bugzavich, graphics lab specialist, workgroup member said he supported the plan.

"I guess I was satisfied with it to the extent that when you try to create a tech plan it's an enormous task," he said. "To try to predict what is going to unfold five years down the road is impossible, as far as I'm concerned.

Can you put some measures in place, some benchmarks that you would like to achieve? Absolutely. Were things like that put in the plan? I believe so. Was it a perfect plan? No, it probably wasn't."

Other campus stakeholders expressed dissatisfied with the plan. When it was presented to the Academic Senate on January 25, the response was divisive.

"People were not happy with the way it was created," said Academic Senate President Angelina E. Stuart. "I think that a lot of people feel it is being imposed on them rather than developed in collaboration with them."

Dr. Mink Stavenga, AOC co-chair ,said he believes that most of the faculty's concerns were not about content as much as process.

"It seems to be more related to how the plan was developed, and not the plan itself," he said. "The subject of technology itself is potentially controversial. It concerns resources and resources are scarce. You potentially have different groups wanting to have the greater influence on a portion of a technology plan."

Lesh said the workgroup was initially optimistic about their charge.

"I expected that we would have a group of administrators, faculty and classified all represented at the table and we would actually put together a tech plan that would cover all areas of campus, and we would all have input on the plan," she said.

Nick Alioto, former vice-president of business and financial affairs hired an outside consultant to help develop the plan.

"Early on, he (Alioto) decided that the plan was an administrative function rather than an accreditation function and he hired, with the blessings of former superintendent Dr. Raj K. Chopra, an outside vendor, WTC Consultants," said Vess.

Consultant cost to the college is estimated at $122,000. Alioto said the cost wasn't quite that high, and that $90,000 of that fee was for an IT assessment of Computer Systems Services (CSS).

Members of the workgroup questioned hiring the consultant.

"If we're using all those consultants, why are we paying other people six figures to do the job, when all they do is hire out?" said Lambert.

"We have enough talent on this campus that we could've developed a technology plan and an evaluation of CSS without spending $125,000."

Stavenga said he supported the hiring of WTC.

"Obviously, you want to utilize consultants with the least amount of expense to the college and have the greatest amount of expertise being disseminated to as many people as possible," he said.