To the Board…
November 19, 2009
CODFA PRESIDENT STANKO ADDRESSES BOT: PLEASE USE THE WORDS IN OUR CONTRACT THAT WE THE FACULTY, ADMINISTRATION, ATTORNEYS, AND BOARD HAVE ALREADY NEGOTIATED
Nancy Stanko, President of the COD Faculty Association and Professor of Office Technology Information, made the following comments to the Board of Trustees at its meeting November 19, 2009:
We again object to the Board Policies that are being presented this evening and ask that you withdraw them. This is a departure from the process used in the past, and it is unacceptable to the COD Faculty Association. Any impact that the new policies and procedures have on terms and conditions of employment must be bargained with the Association and making changes may result in a violation of the Act. As you know, we have filed an Unfair Labor Practice suit, and we continue to object to the method used for these changes. The Policies included on today's Agenda include language that is not included in our Contract.
However, I applaud you for initiating a face-to-face meeting with students, administrators, and Board members to draft an alternate Policy Statement for 25-135, Educational Philosophy. These are issues that are important to all of us. This is similar to what I requested at the May 21, 2009, Board meeting in which I made the statement that CODFA requested an opportunity to meet with you to discuss reasons for our objections to the Board Policies. However, this did not happen. Consequently, in the summer CODFA filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board claiming that the adoption of the revised policies violates our members' rights under the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act. Since filing this charge, CODFA is not able to work with you on the Board Policies unless the IELRB makes a decision on the charge, or we agree to some type of settlement among our attorneys.
I will e-mail you copies of pages 10, 11, and 14 of our CODFA Contract in which "Academic Freedom" and the "Procedure for Verification of Student Complaints" has been negotiated with you. I ask that you use this wording in your draft since it is in our Contract, and you continue to include the statement at the bottom of your Board Policies that "This Policy shall be administered consistent with the College's collective bargaining agreement obligations."
Our entire negotiated Contract (2007-2011 Faculty Agreement) is available electronically on our CODFA web site. Negotiating contracts take hundreds of hours of work with many, many people. Please use the words in our Contract that we the faculty, administration, attorneys, and Board have already negotiated. Changes to these words will impact our working and employment conditions.
