A closer examination of public claims.

In the May 6th Valley Herald article, President Mark Browning made the following claims:

  1. We have the costliest faculty in the state.  Yet if you look at the IPEDS data (See: Average Expense ), BMCC faculty are simply average.  It may surprise you that the top of the pay scale for the Pendleton High School is higher than the average salary at BMCC.
  2. 39 positions have been eliminated, and the brunt of that was by classified and exempt staff.  Actually, 13 positions were faculty positions, which is 33%, indicating this burden was evenly shared.
  3. BMCC employs 47 full-time faculty-- when in reality, the recent list of faculty provided by the administration included only 36.  They are conflating their numbers by including faculty that work in Corrections (there are only 9 here), but these instructors are on a separate contract from the state and do not affect the BMCC budget.
  4. College Prep will be replaced by community education.  This cannot and will not happen, because college prep is contract work and bound by labor law to remain as such, and the students who need college prep are our most vulnerable and financially bound students who would otherwise not be able to pay for these classes.

At the April 25th Budget Meeting, many great questions were raised by the BMCC Board, the responses to some of these important questions lead to more questions than were adequately answered. Here is a short video with some of those questions along with commentary and suggestions based on the responses.