Today in front of a large crowd of students, faculty, and other staff, the full-time faculty association announced they have given notice to MHCC and will go on strike beginning at 5 a.m. on Thursday, May 12.

Recently the board has been quoted as saying that by a unanimous decision of the board that faculty who strike could be replaced with permanent replacements. That's right - I said PERMANENT. As in they are going to bring in people completely new to the school and they will be there from now on and even when all of this is over our faculty will not be able to return.

So a few days ago, I put in a request to get the long version of the budget. The document handed out at the Budget Committee was general and very devoid of details. In it there was language about cuts to be made and where savings would be found, but no details on what that would be. Numbers didn't even match with what had previously been discussed by the school, particularly with regards to instruction and savings because of cuts to programs, instructor pay, layoffs, etc. 

There were generic categories saying how much would be spent, but no details on how it would be spent.

On Wednesday night, the proposed budget for 2011-2012 was unveiled at a meeting of the Budget Committee (otherwise known as the Board of Education since the school only allows board members to be on the Committee).

You can view the 2011-12 proposed budget here 

This budget shows the students paying larger fees and tuition for less instruction and services. Here's a little bit of the data in chart form:

In recent weeks, board members and the administration at the school have been complaining about how enrollment is flat or decreasing and that is causing problems for the school. They had been trying to say that enrollment had been down all year, but had to admit recently that it was only Spring Term where the numbers were down.

How much has enrollment declined? According to numbers provided to me by MHCC, it is down a whole 0.5% (48 students).

There has been a lot of talk about how money has been wasted by our current board. One example has been the $310,000 for the web site. I recently was sent the link to the Request for Proposal (RFP) for the project. In it is the details about what the job entails, services requested, etc.

After going through the RFP, we found it is even more wasteful than we thought. The contract isn't about the content and reoganizing the site to make it work better for all the stakeholders. It is purely about asthetics, potential logo change, style sheets, etc.