ARCHIVE 9: October 2009

DAVID'S PERSONAL NEWS PAGE
and JOURNAL

Jan/Feb 2009
March 2009
April 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
September 2009
 

In this Archive:

Believing blogs
Budget cuts
Max Lyons
Pain for City/Budgets
Zoomify, 1st test

October 30, 2009 - San Diego: District Budget Issues

I will really be glad to see this month come to an end.  It has been so packed with last-minute work piled on top of an existing mountain of work, I've been a little off-kilter all month and have allowed the "urgent" to overwhelm the "important" in scheduling.  I need to step back and regroup.  But there looks to be precious little time for that perhaps until the Thanksgiving Break.

We got an email from the district yesterday asking for input on the budget issues.  The union idiot predictably responded with a paranoid rant since they have a vested interest in having us only hear their side of things.  But the gist of it was a recognition that they all were (and mostly still are) in fantasy land over the recovery of the economic chaos in the state.  They put all their eggs in the basket of the newly annointed Messiah-in-Chief in Washington to fix both Federal and State economic problems and when it turns out he has done neither and the State Assembly has refused to budge from its entitlement mentality, the District's huge well of "rainy day" money is getting quite low.  And now for 2010-2011 unless something turns around very quickly they will need to trim another $8-million from the District Budget.  Since the budget is nearly 99% Payroll, that is a real problem. 

I truly appreciated hearing the data but the ever brilliant union guy only saw it as a scare tactic to undermine them and ranted on about how we have a contract through 2011 that cannot be breached and only the union should be addressing the troops.  So I am assuming that since the State is not paying the district, when the district runs out of funds, he and the union will handle the payroll issues.  Oh yeah, I'm holding my breath for that to happen...

Other schools in the State, all with union contracts (since as one would expect in Kalifornia, this is NOT a "Right to Work" state) have had to close completely.  Several schools in the LA area imposed a 14% pay cut on employees which put lots of professors below the survival level of income.  I'll bet that was not in the union agreement.

Dave and I are fairly safe since the program cannot run with less that two instructors and as an applied program we cost the district less because we augment our needs with vocational grants.  But were I an adjunct professor I would be sweating bullets.  We have already had to virtually cancel all of their classes for Summer (and may end up canceling ours as well).  It used to be if one school did not have available classes some other regional school would so the Freeway Flyers simply went there.  But this is effecting every school in the State and City is actually far better off than most. 

Stand by for updates... it is getting interesting.

Meantime I'm beginning to design and script a series of tutorial videos for online course content and perhaps sales at workshops and seminars.  The CTC tour Video was a test bed and it seemed to work quite well.   It is time to get creative again...

October 23, 2009 - San Diego: New Building and Budget Woes

This month has been filled with school work on weekends and no time to get away, which is VERY frustrating to me.  I get twitchy when I'm not able to get out and make images on a regular basis.  The good news is that classes seem to be going well and this week I just started the 8-week special techniques class on Macro and Close Up photography which ought to be a lot of fun.  But the unexpected pile of last minute curricula stuff that has to be finished (which includes new courses in the system plus I had to re-write over 80 percent of our other courses so that they matched the latest greatest requirements to please the Accreditation Committee for our upcoming inspection) means a lot of other things in my life have had to get set aside.  One of them has been this news page.  Sorry.

Today the photo faculty was able to tour the new building to see the progress and get a feel for what lies in store for us.  There is a lot of work to do but the firm expectation is that we will be able to start moving in sometimes in June of 2010.  That is really exciting!

It was especially exciting to see it as more than plans on paper.  It is REAL and happening... we could touch it.  I took some video of the tour largely to give me some footage to test out a lightweight editor for putting together course content for online classes.  If you have the plans memorized as I thing Dave and I do it makes a lot more sense but to see real walls and get a sense of the actual size of the rooms is so amazing.  We only had a half hour to tour the two floors so shooting from a tripod was out of the question.  All I tried to capture was a sense of the reality of the progress.  AS it gets closer to reality we will be able to better document what it will really look like.

The fourth floor was well underway with drywall almost finished and some of it being painted already.  The fifth floor is still largely open framing and darker than my little camcorder liked but it will still let you know this is really happening.  Here in spite of my complaining, is a link to the CTC page where you can play a streaming video of the tour. The only problem is that it is a streaming video and the buffer in some browsers is slow to start so the first scenes are jerky until the buffer fully catches up.  A Replay however plays just fine.  Sorry but I've not figured out how to fix that yet.  (GO TO CTC PAGE)

Unfortunately, we are still slashing  more and more classes due to the state's budget debacle.  Summer alone we were initially forced to cut 45% of our sections compared to last summer which was a pretty light schedule anyway.  And now we are being asked to eliminate it altogether to spend full time on the move... I assume without pay.  Since the "suggestion" was not to bring in adjuncts to free is up it does not appear to really be about the move per se.  However Dave and I are trying to show them we can create a schedule that allows us to teach at least a skeletal schedule, oversee the move, and then actually physically move classes but since the final decision is right on top of us we have had to add that bit of planning to the rest of the pile and give it some major priority.  In the end it may not work but we depend on summer "feeder" classes to prime the pump for the Fall's intermediate and advanced levels.  All we can do is try...