City College Of San Francisco Implements Major Changes To Avoid Closure (PHOTOS)

It hasn't been an easy year for the City College of San Francisco.

In July, the two-year college, the largest in the entire state of California, received a letter from the community college commission threatening to strip the school of its accreditation due to poor leadership and lack of adequate resources. No accreditation would deem CCSF ineligible for state funding, which would all but guarantee its closure.

In the wake of closure threats, instances of the school's flagrant mismanagement came to light, including a review that found 92 percent of its spending allocated towards faculty salaries and benefits.

Then in September, a group of student protesters stormed a CCSF Board of Trustees meeting that had assembled to address the school's budget crisis. The demonstrators vehemently opposed a move to assign a special trustee from the state to oversee the college's financial future, demanding their school remain democratic.

In response to the protests, California Community College Chancellor Jack Scott warned that CCSF was in danger of going bankrupt.

So the CCSF Board voted to appoint the special trustee, and administrators have since begun implementing a series of major transformations in an effort to keep its accreditation. The school has until March 15 to prove itself to the accrediting commission.

The San Francisco Chronicle took a look at the specific changes the school is in the process of undergoing in a special report. See some of CCSF's improvements below, and click over to the Chronicle to read the full investigation.

• Layoffs

  For the first time in recent history, City College of San Francisco has promised to lay off dozens of full and part-time employees in January as an effort to manage costs.

• Student Learning Outcomes

  CCSF faculty members have vowed to put more weight on the practice of student learning outcomes, or studying student performance as a means for designing future curricula.

• Enrollment Management

  CCSF officials will study enrollment data to determine what classes to offer and the frequency with which to offer them, a practice that hasn't been employed before.

• A New Mission

  CCSF leaders will revise the school's mission statement to focus on more tangible goals for its students.

• Crackdown on Department Chairs

  CCSF's Board of Trustees voted to send department chairs back to the classroom to teach full-time, thus eliminating the need to hire part-time faculty members. The administrative work previously done by department chairs will be shifted to various deans.

• Fewer Campuses

  The school will reevaluate the more than 100 "instructional sites" dotted throughout the city and determine which leases to forego.

• Budgeting

  CCSF will abandon its "live from year to year" budgeting strategy in favor of creating a three-year projection plan.

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/27/city-college-of-san-francisco_n_2371784.html

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