Karen Sanchez
Good afternoon, Trustees.
My name is Karen Sanchez. As co-department head for English Language Acquisition (ELA), I help manage the largest department on campus—30% larger than Math and 40% larger than English.
I was shocked to hear of management’s bargaining proposal to strip department head reassigned time and replace it with an insultingly small stipend.
In ELA, my co-chair and I oversee 40 associate faculty members, build quarterly schedules, manage curriculum, handle daily crises, coordinate with our ELA Student Services team, and attend 2 to 3 hours of meetings daily—all while teaching a 10-credit class. Under this proposal, we would teach a full 15-credit load while doing the exact same administrative workload. That is mandatory, uncompensated overtime.
It is also physically impossible. Thinking about this load literally gives me chest pains. A former ELA department head left to become an Associate Dean for a 33% pay increase because that full-time administrative role matched her DH workload. If Edmonds College demands this impossible standard, I—and others—will be forced to look for work elsewhere. It is just not possible.
Furthermore, offering a flat $2,500 stipend without release time across all departments essentially provides pay DEcrease. Five credits of release time could earn me approximately $8,000. Spokane Community College provides chairs with stipends ranging from $15,000 to $20,000 annually based on department size.
We do not just need to keep our reassigned time—a department of our size actually requires more of it. Strip it, and our systems, faculty support, and student learning will devolve, and Edmonds College will soon lose its great reputation in this area.
I understand the desire to economize, but management’s proposal demonstrates a profound disrespect for and ignorance of the value of our work. I urge the Board to tell management to withdraw this proposal and bargain in good faith.
Thank you,
Karen Sanchez
Erik Ray
I am Erik Ray and I have been History Department Head since 2001. When I began, I was the only full-time faculty and we offered 10 sections in fall 2001. This fall, we offered 21 sections, including 4 sections of African-American History (the only Washington community college to do so). I am still the only full-time faculty. We have not replaced Katie Simonton after her retirement. This fall, we have three AF doing full loads and two doing overloads. Each quarter, we add 3-6 sections after enrollment has begun. This summer, we added 6. I am doing far more work than I did 25 years ago (scheduling, hiring of AF, consultation with Running Start about its scheduling needs, etc.). And, yet, this current contract proposal asks me to take less money, when I can strongly make a case for more.
Every department head has a similar story. I ask the Board to urge management to withdraw their current stipend proposal and compensate department heads fairly for the work that they do.
Thank you for your consideration,
Erik Ray
David Breed
Greetings,
During the pandemic, the college was in dire financial straits and all college employees were asked to take a temporary pay cut to balance the budget. No one liked it but we accepted it as necessary; a shared sacrifice for college survival.
How different does that feel from the notion of someone suggesting a pay cut of 10% or even 20% for only administrative employees? Perhaps administrators would feel hurt, targeted, or angry over the underlying premise that their work, done on behalf of the staff, faculty and students they serve, is suddenly being undervalued. Fortunately, no one I know of has made such an outrageous suggestion!
This is how faculty feel now. Department head work is administrative work and it has grown tremendously in scope over the last 3 years. As faculty we do it because the work must get done. We do the work because we love our students, our peers and programs and recognize someone must do it. It is the worst time for an administration proposal to slash the compensation faculty earn for department head work by as much as 75%! This proposal left me feeling very dispirited and devalued for the many hours of work I do as High School Completion department head.
I do not know the intent of this proposal. Perhaps it’s a bargaining tactic; not a serious proposal? But whether this is an honest idea or a tactic, it lands the same way with the people doing this work! We would rather be helping students than spending all this time developing schedules, reviewing programs or editing minutiae in Curriculog. Yet we do it because we are experts in this work.
Please be mindful of how such proposals will affect faculty already suffering from low morale. We are all professionals here. Let’s agree to respect one another as such and to again have productive negotiations. Thank you.
Chuck Mueller
Hello Trustees.
I would like to start by echoing statements made by Erik Ray, David Breed, and Karen Sanchez during the public comment regarding replacing the reassigned time provided to department heads with a small stipend.
Proposing this change to the CBA with no clear change in workload is viewed as disrespectful by members of the faculty union. It ignores the time-intensive and demanding work that our department heads perform to support students and faculty and coordinate scheduling. Requiring department heads to maintain a full teaching load while also performing department head duties for a stipend is tantamount to mandatory overtime and will make the department head position even less appealing to faculty. The signatures on this petition are evidence of that. I hope management is listening.
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Now, for the new folks in the room, allow me to begin with a short history lesson. In July 2025, college management decided not to pay the Nursing faculty their high-demand salary enhancements. They decided this without informing the Nursing faculty. The nurses found out when they saw their paychecks.
These salary enhancements were mandated and funded by the state legislature as a part of the Workforce Education Investment Act of 2019. However, in 2025, the funds for these salary enhancements were removed from proviso, which meant that colleges could choose not to give that money to their Nursing faculty. The vast majority of colleges gave the money to their Nursing faculty anyway. The management of Edmonds College did not.
So the union stepped in. We spread the word to faculty and students. We spoke to state legislators about the issue. Nursing faculty spoke at BOT meetings. As a result, by the end of 2025, management gave the nurses their full pay.
Or so we thought.
The union has discovered that high-demand funds provided to the college prior to 2025 were used to pay for employee health care premiums. They were also used to pay the base salary of the Nursing Director. This decision violates two sections of the CBA and at least one relevant RCW that reads in part:
“... expenditures from the workforce education investment account must be used to supplement, not supplant, other federal, state, and local funding for higher education.”
So, while these funds were required by law to only be used to enhance the salaries of Nursing faculty, the management of this college chose instead to use the funds to pay the base compensation of employees. In other words, our Nursing faculty were never given their full enhanced pay.
The VP of HR and VPI were informed of this in November 2025. They were reminded of these facts in July 2026. At that second meeting, all parties agreed that the best use for those misdirected funds was to support tutoring sessions for Nursing students.
That’s right! The Nursing faculty wanted to use those funds to support their students.
The VPs agreed to provide the union with an accounting of all the money that was misdirected by the college by the end of August 2026 as the first step towards enacting this student-centered solution. It is now October 2026, and the union has not received that information. The union has reached out three times to meet about this issue and received no response from management.
Receiving this information is vital to begin the process of giving Nursing students the tutoring sessions they need. These sessions are to be funded by money that was legally required to be given to Nursing faculty in the first place. I am sure that our state legislators would be interested to hear how the college actually used those funds.
In the meantime, I can only speculate why the management of this college has not provided this information and is thereby preventing students from receiving tutoring.
Thank you.