District at risk of losing local control

The Peralta Community College District may soon be forced to cede power to the state if its Board of Trustees can’t quell concerns about its ability to properly govern the district.

Intervening at the district, home to four East Bay colleges ser ving almost 30,000 st udent s, would be a drastic step. Only twice previously has the state chancellor’s office and the systemwide Board of Governors assumed power from a locally- elected governing board: At the City College of San Francisco in 2013 and at Compton College in 2004.

The colleges in Peralta, one of 73 districts in California’s vast 116 community college system, are Laney College and Merritt College in Oakland, Berkeley City College and the College of Alameda.

Eloy Ortiz Oakley, the state chancellor overseeing California’s community colleges, is under increasing pressure to inter vene, including from former Peralta chancellors, two of Peralta’s current and former trustees, Oakland’s NAACP chapter and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team ( FCMAT), a statefunded agency that provides financial oversight of K-12 and community college districts.

Those groups and individuals are calling for state intervention at Peralta to fix its problems: shaky finances, academic probation and what they call a broken relationship between trustees and top administrators. The district is currently fighting to keep its accreditation, with all four colleges having been put on probation last year by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

Oakley is expected to decide by the system’s Jan. 19 board meeting whether it is necessary to increase his office’s oversight of the district and possibly appoint a special trustee, who would likely have far-reaching powers.

Tensions between the elected boards of trustees in community college districts and the president sand chancellors whom they appoint is not unusual. But those at the center of the conflict sat Peralta say that what is happening in the district undermines the mission of the colleges.

Current and former members of the district’s leadership, including the past three chancellors, accused the board of micromanagement, said board members frequently interfered in their authority to perform duties, such as hiring executive staff and approving contracts. They also said the board’s leadership is closely allied with the faculty union in the district and focused more on appeasing the union on issues such as collective bargaining than on programs to help students reach completion.

“In all of my 35 years of working at community colleges, I’ve never seen anything like I’ve seen in the nine months I was at Peralta. It’s a very difficult place to be,” Regina Stanback Stroud, a veteran of the community college system who resigned as chancellor of the district in July, said in an interview.

She left her position as chancellor after only nine months on the job.

In the last two years, three chancellors have left the district after conflicts with board leadership. After Stroud departed the district last summer, the president of Oakland’ s NAACP chapter called the board’ s actions toward those chancello rs“demoralizing” to Peralta’s Black administrators, faculty and students. Stroud and her two predecessors are Black.

The district’s other executive staff also has high rates of turnover. Currently, at least four vice chancellor positions are filled by either interim or acting staff members.

Board President Cindi Napoli- Abella Reiss, former board president Julina Bonilla and Interim

Chancellor Carla Walter, who was previously vice chancellor of finance and administration in the district, declined to be interviewed.

“The signs are promising that wear eon the right path,” district spokesman Mark Johnson said in a statement.

He predicted that the district will be lifted off academic probation this month and said the district is in a better fiscal position than it was 18 months ago when the state oversight agency that has reviewed the district’ s finances labeled Peralta a “high risk” of fiscal insolvency.

Jim Austin, a fiscal monitor appointed to the district by Oakley, said at a Board of Governors meeting la st year that the district made“very impressive” progress on the concerns raised by FCMAT, which included budget deficits and staffing problems. Oakley appointed Austin to that position in fall 2019 after FCMAT’S report. In his role as a fiscal monitor, Austin was essentially a watchdog over the district but had no authority or powers.

However, he said that there is “another side of the coin” and said the district is plagued by “board governance and chancellor- board relationship issues,” which he said threatens the district’s long- term fiscal health.

Michelle Gia co mini, the deputy executive officer of FCMAT, wrote an August letter to the state chancellor’s office voicing a range of concerns about Peralta, including “in effective board governance .” She also wrote that systems within the district are “fully or partially controlled by highly influential special interest groups .”

Giacomini said in an interview that the faculty union and other bargaining groups are among those groups.

“The Board of Governors should consider increasing its oversight role in the district over and above the current status of fiscal monitor,” Giacomini wrote in the letter, referring to the statewide governing board that oversees all 116 community colleges.

Four of the seven board members this past year were endorsed by the union the last time they were up for election: Bonilla , Reiss, Nicky González Yuen and Karen Weinstein. Those four board members typically voted in unison on most issues. Weinstein has since been replaced by Dyana Polk, who ran unopposed for that seat in 2020 and also was endorsed by the union.

In her resignation letter this summer, Stroud accused the board of“collusion” with the union against the interests of the district. In an interview, Stroud said members of the board would regularly strategize and confer with the faculty union’ s leadership on matters that should have been left to administrators to handle. Stroud’s view was shared by her two predecessors, Peralta’s former interim chancellor Fran White and former chancellor Jowel Laguerre.

Peralta’s board leadership, faculty union and Academic Senate are strongly opposed to the possibility that Oakley, the state chancellor, will appoint a special trustee at the Jan. 19 meeting.

“Our democraticallyelected Board of Trustees need to retain control of our district in the name of those who chose them as representatives,” Donald Moore, a professor of anthropology and president of the Academic Senate, said in a statement that he shared with Edsource.

White, the former interim chancellor at Peralta, said she has long believed that appointing a special trustee is the only option to fix the challenges the district faces.

“To be honest, I thought that in July of last year and I haven’t changed my mind,” she said. “Nothing has happened to make me think that a special trustee isn’t required to get that district back on track — whatever is left of it.”