Standard 7: Faculty & Staff
LPC is staffed by highly committed faculty, administrators, and support personnel who effectively meet the needs of students and instructional programs. To ensure that all hiring for full-time positions is directly related to the College mission and institutional objectives, all employment requests are successively reviewed at the discipline, division, Institutional Planning Committee and Presidential levels. Following approval at these levels, requests are forwarded to the Board for approval. LPC follows Board policies, State and Federal employment laws and adheres to classified staff and faculty contract agreements ensuring fairness in all employment procedures.
Faculty and administrators meet or exceed minimum educational qualifications as defined in AB 1725 and other State regulations. They also meet employment standards stated in the District policies specified at the time of application. A number of faculty and administrators have received national and state recognition for program development, research, textbook and journal article publication, professional presentations, performance or exhibition of art, or for their service in professional organizations or committees. All classified personnel meet or exceed minimum qualifications for their positions, and each is screened and hired on the basis of training, experience, and general suitability.
LPC plans to continue hiring full-time faculty as funding allows, but there is limited space to accommodate incoming faculty. Additionally, space is limited for classified personnel as well. At this point, LPC has outgrown its physical plant, and all current office space is occupied.
Since the last accreditation, Academic Services has been reorganized. In response to one of the self-identified recommendations in the 1996 Accreditation Report, a Reorganization Committee worked in conjunction with a consulting group to recommend changes to the College President in May 1997. These recommendations were subsequently approved by the Board of Trustees and implemented in the 1997-98 academic year.
Many changes have also occurred in for staff and faculty at LPC outside the changes in Academic Services. It is difficult to quantitatively evaluate the changes in classified staff from 1995 to 2002, because of the reorganization and reclassification of many classified positions since the last accreditation. The large number of new faculty hired since our last accreditation has placed a significant burden on existing tenured faculty, as well as on the Division Deans, to serve on untenured and tenured faculty evaluation committees. Evaluations of tenured and untenured faculty have occurred on a regular and timely basis. The criteria used to evaluate faculty meet or exceed accreditation standards.
Evaluations of adjunct instructors have not been consistent among the instructional divisions. Some adjunct instructors are being evaluated with class visits and student evaluations while others are evaluated with only class visits. LPC plans to standardize adjunct faculty evaluations, ensuring that these evaluations occur at specified and frequent intervals.
All full-time and part-time employees of LPC enjoy a variety of professional development opportunities. Faculty and classified staff can find development programs through publications such as the Faculty and Classified Handbooks, Staff Development newsletter, forms and flyers, and at meetings such as Faculty Orientation and the New Faculty Workshop series. Time constraints, workloads and institutional culture at LPC make it difficult for all staff members to fully partake in professional development opportunities.
LPC has a systematic process for recommending policies, regulations and changes to both, (exclusive of collective bargaining issues) to the LPC President, the District Chancellor, and the Board of Trustees.
