Colleagues,

We hope that you enjoyed the activities from last week. Thank you to everyone involved with the Welcome Back, City! activities. To view the Flickr album, click here. We had line dancing, yoga, a photo booth, and a host of other events to share the City College love. Thank you to our colleagues in the Café at City for the coffee. It was so good to see everyone having fun connecting with folks that we haven’t seen in person for nearly two years.

We also hosted another very successful City Women Rock (CWR) event. We offer our appreciation to Mariam and the planning committee for encouraging our students to complete their studies at City College. Students left CWR empowered and motivated to succeed socially and academically, and thanks to HEERF funds, every student left with much needed financial resources to stay in school. Five students were awarded a $2,500 scholarship thanks to alumnus and co-founder of Costco Jim Sinegal.

In today’s video I offer my thoughts on the district’s remote work policy AP 7170. I am supportive of having select people work from home. The fact is that many of us do not have the liberty of being able to work from home because the college’s operations and our students depend on many of us to be on campus. City College is a brick and mortar institution. We serve very deserving students who largely depend on our facilities and other resources that require people to be on campus. There are very lively conversations occurring about flexibility of instruction and support services. In a perfect world with unlimited resources, we would do both. However, we are indeed limited by our human and financial resources.

We have not fully recovered from the hiring freeze of six months ago. We are working toward offering high-quality, in-person and remote options for both students and employees. Everyone responded remarkably to the pandemic moving to a hybrid model that it will take years to fully understand the impact on student learning. We have all endured some form of trauma from these experiences that will take time to research the outcomes. We really need people on campus working on rebuilding, redesigning, recommitting to our campus culture of social justice, equity, and academic excellence. We all have different needs and personalities. Many of us thrive seeing and interacting with our colleagues and students in person. I also honor that others are more productive working from home where they can balance personal responsibilities with work. I see and hear both sides. The perfect solution is both.

Relationships matter. Having you on campus working as a team with your colleagues is an important element in student success. We are all on the same team, yet we all play different roles at our college. Our students come to us with different experiences and expectations. The question becomes how are we going to deliver on our students’ experiences so that they join the learning culture and complete their course of study. We are planting trees in a big forest. It will take time for these things to mature. We have much work occurring around teaching and learning, transfer, completion, our educational and facilities master plans, student success, and a host of other very important efforts that will determine the future of our college.

We value the role that each of you play in student success. We are partners in improving the sense of belonging for our students. There are a number of offices and areas that do not have the liberty of working remotely. Employees in places like the Child Development Center, Bookstore, Café at City, facilities and operations, shipping and receiving, admin services, accounting, and a host of other areas simply have to be on campus to support the operations of having a world-class community college. We need you on campus to support those who do not have the liberty of parity, equality, or fairness in the fact that they are essential to our college’s operations. Many of these folks are some of our lowest paid but most deserving colleagues. With that said, we are supportive of people working remotely one to two days a week. Please watch the view for more details about submitting requests. I invite you to work with your supervisor or manager to determine the impact on students and the college. Please attend College Council or my open office hours for more details.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

All the best.

Ricky Shabazz, Ed.D.