August 4, 1997. The proposal for renumbering, some title changes, and a few other minor changes was adopted. A version of the complete Board Policy Manual as of August 5, 1997 in MSWord 6.0 for Windows may be downloaded. It is 12 pages long.
This completes the "consolidation" process and further discussion will be reflected in the regular Board Web pages on policy development.
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Overview:
The purpose of these Web pages is to provide an overview of the Board's consolidation of the ACC Policy Manual, based on a local adaptation of the principles of "policy governance" as described by John Carver in his book Boards That Make a Difference. The policy-consolidation process is not intended to directly make substantial changes in the substance of Board policy, but the 90% reduction of volume resulting from the elimination of most implementational detail will greatly facilitate subsequent proposals for changes.
All policies and policy provisions which have been deleted from Board policies in the consolidation process have been transferred to administrative authority and remain as administrative rules unless the President changes them.
History:
In the March 1995, a list of the current ACC policies with a short summary of the provisions of each was circulated to the Board and staff. This made the entire substantive content of the Policy Manual available in an easy-to-handle form.
A second version of that list was circulated in September 1995, with the policies divided into four categories: A (no Board-level material), B (some easily-extracted Board-level material), C (more difficult to separate), and D (already consistent with the new principles). This list began the discussion of which policies could be turned over to the administration entirely. It was made clear that the purpose of this division was to reflect the consensus of the Board members about which policies needed discussion - anyone involved in the discussion could move a policy to a category which would require further discussion. A few policies were moved from Group A to Group B and a few more from Group B to Group C.
At the same time, copies of the entire Policy Manual were made available to everyone in the discussion. Also, summaries of Carver's book were made available to staff and, during the fall of 1995, the President and Vice-President led discussions of the Policy-Governance approach in several staff meetings.
In March 4, 1996, the Board adopted a statement of Board Policy Principles.
On April 23, 1996, the Board adopted the General Executive Directives and Limitations and moved the 83 policies still identified as "Group A" to the President's authority. The list of all the policies, divided into the groups, reports on these actions and provides a summary of the consensus about which policies are in which groups at that point in time.
A separate listing, including summaries, of the category C policies is included here.
A separate index of the category D policies, as of August 1996, with links to some of the policy documents, is included here.
A memo (6-19-96) provides a proposed consolidation of all the policies in category B into seven short policies.
On July 1, 1996, a new policy, Monitoring Policy Compliance, was adopted.
In July 1996, these Web pages were posted in order to make the discussion materials more easily available to the staff members. They were updated (including new paragraphs for this "history") after each Board meeting. As the discussion progressed, a "What's New" section was added at the top, summarizing the events of the previous couple of months.
On 8-5-96, a separate placement policy for non-faculty employees was adopted in order to enable adoption of the FY97 proposed staffing table. Thus, the elements of proposed placement policy in the 6-19-96 memo which apply to faculty will not be considered until later, with the category C policies. The remainder of these category B proposals and the input from Trustees, the college attorneys, and college staff, were discussed at the 8-19-96 Committee-of-the -Whole meeting.
Based on the input before and during the 8-19-96 meeting, the revisions of the proposed replacements for the category B proposals were placed on the Board agenda for 9-9-96.
On 9-13-96, two new policies (Open Communication and College Organizational Principles) were proposed for discussion at the 9-23-96 Board of Trustees Committee meeting.
Based on discussion at the 9-23-96 Board of Trustees Committee meeting and on input received in the following week from the President and others, revisions of the proposals were prepared for the Oct. 7 meeting. Following that meeting, revisions of both were prepared for the Oct. 21 Committee meeting (Open Communications, College Organizational Principles). Discussion at the Oct. 21 Committee meeting resulted in some revisions of the Open Communications proposed policy.
Based on discussions by the Professional-Technical Employees Association with the administration, two draft policies relating to contracts for non-faculty employees were prepared for the 10-21-96 Committee meeting. These were discussed at the 10-21-96 Committee meeting.
At the 11-4-96 Board meeting, the proposed policy on College Organizational Principles was adopted without further revisions from the proposal presented at the 10-21-96 meeting. The Full-Time Faculty Senate offered input on the Open Communications Policy and the Professional-Technical Association reported that they are still gathering information from their members on the issue of contracts and the associated proposed policies. (Input from the 10-21 and the 11-4 meetings was incorporated in drafts of the Open Communications policy and the policy regarding contracts for non-faculty employees for discussion at the 11-18 meeting.) At the 11-4 meeting, the Board adopted a resolution with preliminary principles and directives for planning.
At the 12-2-96 meeting, the proposed policy on College Ends was on the printed agenda but was withdrawn. Discussions with the administration indicated that a more comprehensive look at all college documents relating to the college mission would be useful. Various related documents have been identified and listed as resource documents for the discussion at the 1-6-97 meeting.
At the 1-6-97 Board meeting, it was decided that the Board/Administration/Employee-association retreat scheduled for January 24 would have examination of mission-related statements as its primary topic, and would also include a review of the policy-consolidation process. Working from several preliminary worksheets, retreat participants identified a set of possible priorities which will be the starting point for development of a community survey. This survey effort will be carried forward by the Administration separately from the policy-consolidation process. A separate survey was also started on how to handle the final "Group C" policies in the policy consolidation process.
At the 2-3-97 Board meeting, the Board voted to reaffirm the existing policies on Purpose and Mission; the President was directed to review other alternatives, including the results from the retreat and the previous year's pre-planning processes, for possible integration with this group of policies along with the results of the community survey.
A schedule for dealing with the "Group C" policies was proposed prior to the 2-17-97 committee meeting. Based on comments at that meeting, four actions related to policy consolidation were scheduled for consideration at the 3-3-97 Board meeting. At the 2-17-97 committee meeting, the Professional-Technical Employees Association reported that their members do not wish to proceed with the development of a policy on contracts for their employees.
At the March 3, 1997 Board meeting, the four actions presented were adopted. The Full-Time Faculty Senate suggested some additional wording changes to V-74, VIII-70, and VIII-80 which are consistent with the proposals. Those were incorporated into the motion and were adopted too. All of the adopted changes are reflected in the set of policies on the Web except for the changes to V-74, VIII-70, and VIII-80. These policies are scheduled for further consolidation during the spring of 1997.
On March 20, 1997, six proposed consolidation policies (on Performance Evaluation, Due-Process Principles for Terminations of Employment, Regular-Faculty Appointments, Faculty Workload, and Graduate Guarantee) were distributed for review. These were discussed at the 4/7/97 meeting and will be considered for adoption at the 4/21/97 meeting, except for the Due-Process policy, which will probably be considered May 5.
To provide for continuing Board direction on budgeting for property tax rates, on April 7, 1997 the Board adopted Policy II-8 on Property Tax Exemptions.
On April 13, 1997, revisions of these six proposed consolidation policies were prepared for review. Five of them will be considered for adoption at the 4/21/97 meeting and the remaining one at the May 5 meeting.
On April 21, 1997, the Board of Trustees adopted the four proposed consolidated policies concerning performance evaluations and faculty appointments, including placement and workloads: V-74, V-75, VIII-74, and VIII-75. These consolidate provisions scattered through a number of our former policies: V-74, V-75, VIII-62, VIII-70, VIII-74, VIII-75, VIII-80, and VIII-85. These consolidated policies omit much of the implementational detail, thus leaving that up to the administration.
Also on April 21, 1997, the college attorney informed the Board that our Graduate Guarantee Policy violates some of the legal constraints on the college, so it was repealed. The following policies were transferred to administrative authority: V-6, Grading System, and V-70, Faculty Titles. The policy to be considered on May 5 is the proposed new policy on Due Process Requirements for Employee Terminations. It both consolidates the existing provisions for full-time faculty without substantive change and extends some due-process protections to non-faculty without substantive change and also extends some due process protections to non-faculty staffing-table employees for the first time. This latter topic has been discussed in several Board meetings.
On June 16, 1997, at the Committee-of-the-Whole meeting, the proposed calendar and proposed renumbering of the policies was discussed.
On July 1, 1997, a revision of the completion of the consolidation process was distributed. It includes several title changes, a consolidation of former policies I-6 (Legal Counsel) and I-9 (College Legal Manual) into the new C-7 (Legal Counsel), and consolidation of VIII-46 (Employee Leave) and VIII-29 (Sick Leave Pool) into the new F-10 (Employee Leave). Also, since it matches the policy-governance style, the version of V-1 (Statement of Instructional Philosophy) which is shown in the College Catalog is used rather than the version which was produced by ACC 2000. On July 7, an MSWord 6.0 document has been posted for downloading with the same content as the revision mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, but with some formatting improvements. The printed document is about 15 pages long.
On August 4, 1997, the Board of Trustees adopted
the reorganization of the Board Policies as had been proposed
in the document described in the previous paragraph here and dated
July 6, thus completing the Policy Consolidation project. On August
13, a 12-page MSWord 6.0 document
has been posted for downloading with the complete Board Policy
Manual as of August 5, 1997, along with an introduction, the planning
resolutions, and a condensed version of the Board calendar. Further
review and revision of policies will be considered each year as
part of the regular Board calendar.
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