What is a SERP?
by David Yancey, FA, AFT 6157 President

By now most of those who are eligible have been notified and many who are not are all asking questions about the District’s new retirement proposal called SERP.

Basically it is a program that one of the District’s financial consultants has developed to attempt to save money by getting eligible faculty to retire. The Supplemental Employee Retirement Plan (SERP) is meant to reduce the number of more senior tenured faculty in our district thereby reducing costs to the district.

The offer is an annuity worth 70.88% of your base annual salary to be paid for by the district and paid to the participating faculty in a variety of formats over some specified period of time. The part that most people are concerned about is the timing. If you choose to participate then the decisions must happen rapidly. You must retire or resign by January 28 of 2010 and can never be rehired as a full time employee of the District again. However, you can teach as an adjunct within the limitations of your retirement and you can chose to remain active in STRS or PERS if you resign but don’t want to retire.

The savings to the district is particularly in the timing. It is critical that this SERP occur at the end of this semester. They will save this money by not replacing full time faculty in the next several semesters. But there is a catch. To make this a viable financial deal for the District there needs to be a minimum number of faculty retire.

Agreement to Hire Full Time Faculty Part of the Deal

The FA, AFT 6157 is supportive of this offer because we know there are some of our members that may want to take advantage of this program. We were also very concerned that there are too few full time faculty now to carry out the work of the curriculum committees, hiring committees, TRC committees, accreditation as well as Finance, CPC and other college wide demands for faculty participation.

So, as part of the Union’s agreement to support this SERP plan we were able to negotiate with the District a structured plan to rehire faculty to replace those who take advantage of the SERP as well as other existing vacancies over the next four academic years. If the rehiring follows the plan we have designed there will be 45 full time faculty (assuming 27 full timers take the SERP) hired over the next four-five years. David Yancey and Barbara Hanfling spent weeks coming up with an agreement that would allow faculty to take advantage of this plan, but would also ensure that these 27 faculty would be rehired along with an additional 18 full time faculty.

We know the time is short and the impact of the decisions will be long lasting but these are difficult times and the budgetary circumstances in California are not likely to improve in the immediate future. So if this fits your retirement needs and you are comfortable making this magnitude of a decision this quickly then we at the FA, AFT 6157 encourage you to take advantage of this offer.