Faculty Rights Tip: Workload for Counselors and Evaluation Criteria for Faculty
Counselor faculty often find themselves supervised by administrators who are unfamiliar with the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). This can create problems in a number of areas, especially counselors’ workload and evaluation.
Counselors may find they are assigned extra work. The following provision in Article 20: Workload is useful for discussions that must take into account expectations and the number of hours counselors work and are compensated for:
20.11 The assignments and responsibilities of a counselor faculty unit employee may include but shall not be limited to individual counseling, group counseling, consultation and referral, case management (including record keeping), intern training and supervision, teaching, service on systemwide and campus committees and task forces, and activities that foster professional growth including creative activity and research. The nature of such assignments shall correlate closely with activities expected of counselor faculty unit employees in order to qualify for retention, tenure/ permanency, and promotion, and after tenure/permanency, activities expected of counselor faculty unit employees in order to maintain their roles as contributing members of the campus community. Such assignments shall be made by the appropriate administrator after consultation with the counselor faculty unit employee. This consultation shall include consideration of the amount of time necessary for the successful completion of counselor responsibilities within the counselor workweek. All such counselor faculty unit employee assignments and schedules shall be made pursuant to provision 20.15.
Counselors’ supervisors may also be conducting unfair and flawed evaluations because they are unaware that evaluation provisions, requiring that expectations be set out before the reviewing period is underway, apply to all faculty unit employees. The following provision in Article 15: Evaluation of our CBA applies to all unit 3 faculty employees, including temporary and tenure-track counselors.
15.3 Evaluation criteria and procedures shall be made available to the faculty unit employee no later than 14 days after the first day of instruction of the academic term. Evaluation criteria and procedures shall be made available to the evaluation committee and the academic administrators prior to the commencement of the evaluation process. Once the evaluation process has begun, there shall be no changes in criteria and procedures used to evaluate the faculty unit employee during the evaluation process.
We urge all faculty members to contact chairs or immediate supervisors to learn about relevant evaluation criteria and procedures at the campus, college, and department levels. Faculty should not have expectations changing and shifting throughout the academic term and/or review period. If your department has not made such criteria available, for any reason, we encourage you to contact your CFA Faculty Rights representative immediately.
On November 20, 2020, CFA’s Bargaining Team proposed that (1) the working conditions of our counselors and meeting the needs of students should adhere to national standards of counseling services with a 1-counselor-per-1,000-1,500-students accommodation. (More than half of our 23 campuses are not meeting this most crucial expectation); and (2) the contract strengthens the protections for counselor workload by clarifying what constitutes direct and indirect service to students. After over four months since proposing these changes, we continue to await a response from management on this proposal, as of March 24, 2021. You can read CFA’s proposal here and read about all of our proposals.
As we move through the bargaining process, we need maximum faculty involvement and solidarity to win a contract that acknowledges that Counselor Faculty Working Conditions Are Student Healing Conditions!
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