What Pc-exit would involve

If there is one thing Kern Community College District Trustee John Corkins and I have in common, it is that we’re both numbers guys. Mr. Corkins has focused his time on the board examining budgets and other numbers, hoping to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent well.

But it doesn’t take a numerical genius to count to five and that’s the number that matters. Of the seven members of the board, five come from the Bakersfield College service area. Mr. Corkins serves the Porterville area and the Cerro Coso Community College area is served by another.

We’ve always known that when push comes to shove, we could be treated unfairly. But it hasn’t seemed to matter much in most of the 17 years I’ve worked for the district. It is only in the last year or two that a majority of the board began to openly favor one college.

So, it came as only a mild surprise when trustee Corkins revealed a community discussion to have Porterville College leave KCCD and join with College of the Sequoias in a new two-college district. We’d still be the smaller college, but perhaps not quite the same stepchild doormat.

It’s important to note that this is the option, not PC going alone, which would be too expensive.

This has come up before, especially around 2000/2001, about when I joined the college. It was rejected then as too expensive and complicated a venture to undertake. Cooperation was preferable.

Anyone from outside looking at the district would likely conclude that if we could go back to 1967, PC combined with Sequoias would be a better fit. They’re in the same county, though Sequoias covers part of Kings County as well. And Porterville has a closer relationship with Visalia than with Bakersfield.

But, just because it would have been the better idea then doesn’t make it a slam dunk now. The reason is, it takes nearly an act of God to make such a swap happen. I’ll cover just a portion of the issues involved.

The first are the legal ones. For PC to separate from KCCD and join COS would require the approval of several government agencies, starting with both district boards which would have to determine that it is in the best interest of students and taxpayers.

Assuming it is undergone, the new district would have to design a new set of board policies and procedures. Sequoias has always been a single-college district, so much of the district parts of this would be new to them, involving issues they hadn’t considered before.

Then you have a big one, the labor contracts. COS has contracts with three unions, one each representing full-time and part-time faculty, and one for classified employees. In KCCD, full-time and parttime faculty are in the same union, a complex and sometimes conflicting set of interests. All of these contracts would have to be negotiated into new agreements, a process that wouldn’t be easy for the new set of trustees or the employees involved.

Then, there is the one that concerns me: The technology. All of PC’S network infrastructure goes through the district office in Bakersfield. All of the data I use each day is stored there. Though Sequoias is only one college, they do have two centers and likely some experience with that technology, but rerouting things would be an expensive and complex endeavor.

Luckily, both colleges use the same enterprise reporting system: Banner. But, COS has employed Banner as a single-college district while KCCD was one of the first to do so in a multi-college setting.

You’re used to me giving opinions in this column, but I’m not going to provide an overall verdict here. I don’t have one and as an employee of KCCD, it is not my place anyway. And though it typically goes without saying in this column, I’ll remind you anyway: I do not in any way speak for the college.

Mr. Corkins said it correctly at a meeting at the college recently, essentially (I’m paraphrasing) that we should only do this if it’s in the best interests of students.

Over the long-term, I can see some benefit to students. In the short and medium-term, the cost and time investment would be substantial and they would be undertaken at a time when the college is searching for a new president and going into an accreditation cycle. Though the problems the community members are concerned about are very real, it is for these reasons that I am hoping the issues between the Porterville area and Kern Community College District can be resolved peacefully.