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Volume 38 Issue 3
October 3, 2000

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Panel seeks to temper instructor shortage

BY KARA WIREMAN
MESA LEGEND
Submitted October 3, 2000

With an impending K-12 teacher shortage on the horizon for much of the nation, colleges and universities are also examining the problem to see if it will affect them.

Maricopa Community College District Chancellor Fred Gaskin said he expects to hire about 100 new full-time faculty members district-wide each year, indefinitely, in order to “elevate the profession of teaching.”

“We will engage in a very proactive recruitment strategy with the current faculty and also begin to develop a program where we will grow a portion of MCCD new faculty through special programs,” Gaskin said.

Dr. Gail Mee, MCC dean of instruction, feels fortunate that the shortage has not reached Mesa and she hopes that it never will. “The Maricopa district enjoys a very strong reputation locally but also nationally as a leader in community college education. So, we are fortunate to have people want to come to Maricopa to work,” Mee said.

“We continue to have, for the most part, a significant number of people interested in full-time employment in Maricopa.”

The Faculty Recruitment Commission, one of several programs Gaskin hopes will curb any instructor shortage disaster, made up of a number of MCCD faculty members, has been mustered by Anna Solley, vice-chancellor for academic affairs, to explore this topic.

Although the commission is fairly new, it meets every two weeks to propose some areas they want to explore and improve upon such as:

• recruitment,
• the hiring process,
• the “Grow Our Own” program,
• best practices of other colleges’ methods of recruiting, hiring, and retaining faculty members
• and personnel policies and procedures.

The “Grow Our Own” program explores how to encourage more of the general public in Maricopa County to become interested in teaching for the community colleges.

“Within the next couple of months we hope to have in place some recruiting strategies that would help us recruit quickly and result in large pools of high quality potential faculty that we could hire from for next year,” said Donna Schober, co-chair of the Faculty Recruitment Commission.

Gaskin said he plans to locate the best and most qualified college faculty to replace the large number of retiring faculty by listening to the commission’s ideas.

According to Solley, more than 25 percent of the district’s resident faculty members will be eligible for retirement within the next five years. The district has developed the Active Retirement Program, which allows a retiree to return to the classroom for up to five years on a part-time basis, or 49 percent of their original contract.

MCC has struggled to find faculty in certain areas and disciplines such as in computers due to such a significant demand in professional positions that command large salaries in business and industry, according to Mee.

“More adjuncts will be hired,” said Warren Mosby, president of the district’s Adjunct Faculty Association, “provided that they are competitive, as a result of the large number of people who are eligible to retire in the next few years.”

Although the district determines adjunct faculty’s salary, Mee is very conscious of the need to support adjuncts.

By providing adjunct faculty with access to technology and office space and to integrate them more into the academic life of the college through services like the Faculty Development Program, Mee believes such support can be achieved.

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