When Nicole Siminski began working at Palomar over ten years ago, she joined as a part-time faculty member. While she was excited to teach and connect with students, she wasn’t sure about one thing: How open should she be with her students about being part-time?
She worried that if her students found out she was part-time, they would drop her class to enroll with a full-time professor. She was concerned that students would think she didn’t have time for them.
Unlike her full-time colleagues, she couldn’t offer the same extensive office hours, leaving her with a choice to either work off the clock or not provide the additional support her students needed.
There was an anxiety that students would see part-time faculty as less available than full-time faculty. Because of that anxiety, there was this internalized fear to keep the truth of her position a secret.
Five years later, when Siminski began working as a full-time faculty member at Palomar, those fears were confirmed. A student chose to drop a class and enroll in hers instead, solely because the other professor was part-time.
“That was heartbreaking, because then I knew it was going on when I was part-time,” Siminski said.
Community colleges, like Palomar, rely on part-time faculty to provide most of their student support. During the 1970s, there was a push to fill more college classes with part-time faculty. In 1969, part-time faculty represented 19% of higher education faculty nationwide. Today, that number sits at 76%, according to a 2023 Faculty Association of California Community Colleges Education Institute study.
At Palomar, part-time faculty make up 70% of the faculty, and they teach roughly 50% of the classes offered, according to the Parity Project.
In 1988, California passed AB 1525, a bill to balance the workloads of part-time and full-time faculty. It aimed to have at least 75% of instruction credit courses led by full-time faculty. However, according to a 2019 study, the percentage of credit instruction taught by full-time faculty has remained at 56% for the past four decades.
Looking back on her past self, Siminski wondered what she could do to help part-time faculty.
“I was like, ‘My life is so different now, moving from part-time to full-time. Not just job security but the way I’m compensated, the way my voice is valued, the way I’m seen on campus. So, I would really like to be involved,’” Siminski said.
As she asked herself how she could get involved, she began conversing with Barbara Baer, the part-time co-chair of the Palomar Faculty Federation (PFF).
Barbara Baer, an economics professor at Palomar, was the PFF part-time co-chair from 2017 to 2022. Her main responsibility in that role was to listen and respond to the needs of part-time faculty and relay those conversations to the rest of the PFF.
“It was very clear there was a disparity between the two faculty groups,” Baer said.
She began to look into disparities in pay grades, such as advantages for full-time faculty to increase their pay that weren’t available to part-time faculty. Baer discussed this and other disparities with the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) to brainstorm solutions.
After all the discussions and meetings, Baer and Teresa Laughlin, the PFF’s Full-time Co-Chair at the time, sat down and created the Parity Project. It was the first step in what they knew would be a long but worthy journey to full parity. They then appointed three faculty members to lead the Parity Project.
Nicole Siminski, Shelbi Hathaway, and Anastasia Zavodny were selected to lead this new union. As the first official members of the Parity Project, they refer to themselves as “The Original Three.” Siminski explained that their roles are less about who’s full-time and part-time and more about creating equity between all faculty and classified staff at Palomar.
In 2022, the Parity Project was established, and the fight for equity began.
Shortly after, the Parity Project had its first big win. Ten PFF members joined the CFT in Sacramento to lobby for health insurance coverage for all faculty. The result was full healthcare parity for part-time faculty members, once they hit 40% of the full-time workload, giving them the same plan options and coverage as full-time faculty.
“The state changed the way funding for healthcare went, and Palomar was one of the first to have it in the books,” Siminski said.
After that, the Parity Project began its first “Thank You, and…” campaign. They wrote and read a letter to Palomar’s Governing Board thanking them for their support and collaboration while highlighting remaining disparities for part-time faculty, such as paid office hours and institutional responsibility.
Since then, the Parity Project has run various campaigns to raise awareness about the disparities between part-time and full-time faculty. “Don’t Glaze Over the Facts” was a campaign to reach students and faculty to highlight the need for equity among faculty. The team used donut booths on campus and creative social media posts to make the conversation more approachable.
Another campaign, “How Do You Use Your Office Hours?” showed the different ways part-time faculty use their office hours. In one video, Kristie Hill-Cummings, a part-time biology professor at Palomar, shared how she used her office hours to mentor students and help them with transfer applications and resumes. The series was done to raise awareness of the lack of paid office hours for part-time employees.
Before the 2024-2025 school year, a part-time faculty member teaching a 3-unit course at Palomar received only 4.5 paid office hours for the entire semester. That breaks down to roughly 15 minutes of office time a week, resulting in many part-time faculty working off the clock to help their students.
But thanks to the Parity Project’s most recent win, part-time faculty now have full parity in office hours. Today, a part-time faculty member teaching a 3-unit course at Palomar receives 16 paid office hours for the entire semester, or one hour a week.
While many students may not have seen a change, since many part- time faculty worked off the clock to offer help, they still benefit from the increased paid office hours. Nicole Siminski explained that this investment into part-time faculty will lead to students receiving a better quality experience with their instructors.
Siminski led the negotiations for the increase in office hours.
“Not only was this my first big win as a lead negotiator… but it was the first thing that I signed that gave me chills,” she said.
Siminski explained that the negotiation process was easy, and Palomar seamlessly collaborated with the Parity Project. After Palomar agreed to the increase in office hours, signing a negotiation approving the increase for the 2024-2025 school year, Siminski wrote another “Thank You, and…” letter to Palomar’s Governing Board.
This time, she thanked Palomar for their collaboration and for acknowledging the importance of office hours for part-time faculty.
“[I wanted to tell] the district how much it meant to me because it wasn’t easy being part-time. So, this felt really good,” Siminski said.
She added that the Parity Project was grateful for the win, but there is more to be done with office hours. One example she gave was that both part-time and full-time faculty members are not paid for office hours for summer and intersession courses.
The letter also outlined the progress Palomar needs to make to have full parity between part-time and full-time faculty.
While there has also been some positive movement towards parity regarding institutional services, the Parity Project believes more could be done.
“Full-time faculty have five hours a week of institutional service that they’re paid for. Part-time faculty have no hours per week… they’re not paid for institutional service,” Barbara Baer said.
Institutional service refers to the work faculty members do to serve Palomar, such as joining curriculum committees or a faculty union. There are two ways for part-time faculty to get paid for institutional service, according to Baer.
Part-time faculty members can join one of the 13 paid committees or councils listed in the part-time contract, which offers 30 to 40 hours of paid committee work a year. Or they can use their limited professional development hours.
Baer added that this is important because part-time faculty comprise two-thirds of Palomar’s staff, and their voices should be part of every conversation.
Nicole Siminski echoed Baer’s sentiments that part-time voices needed to be included. When she was part-time, she said she felt welcome to join committees, but never needed. But she immediately felt like her voice and work were needed when she became full-time.
However, with these options to get paid for institutional work, she hopes all faculty will feel that Palomar needs their voices.
The Parity Project does more than fight for part-time faculty; it aims for equality between all faculty and staff at Palomar. Barbara Baer shared the ways the project helps all faculty members at Palomar.
“We found that our [career technical and extended education] faculty, courses like welding, were not able to progress in their payscale because they didn’t have PhDs in their field. Even master’s degrees don’t exist for welding,” Baer said.
When this was discovered, the Parity Project created an alternative payscale to increase the pay for these instructors.
The Parity Project is also working on better support for professors who are deaf and hard of hearing. Baer explained that many of these professors have to miss out on campus events because ASL interpreters have to be requested five days in advance.
Baer continued that the Parity Project is not an us-versus-them situation. Its goal isn’t to take anything away from full-time faculty, only to help part-time faculty be equal.
“It was never meant to be about full-time versus part-time… Let’s unite the faculty… It will help full-timers too because it will take things off their plate that part- timers are either not allowed to do or are not paid to do,” she said.
The efforts are to get Palomar to have an equitable, one-tier faculty. Barbara Baer is very passionate about the One Faculty project. She’s been invited to work with the Parity Project during the next school year to push for more statewide legislation supporting parity initiatives, according to the Parity Project grant proposal.
She went on to add that Palomar and the Parity Project are some of the leaders in the state when it comes to parity.
“The ultimate goal is to move to a single faculty system. The same rules for everybody, same payscales for everybody, same benefits… I don’t know if I’ll see it finished by the time I retire, but I’ve seen so much progress,” Baer said.
Nicole Siminski shared how grateful she was that Palomar has supported the fight for parity. There were no challenges with administration or governing board members when advocating for parity. The only challenge they face is raising awareness of part-time disparity with students.
However, she noted there are ways for students to get involved and show their support. With the temporary office hours increase,Siminski urged students to share how office hours impact their experience at Palomar. If students share their stories online with Palomar or attend Governing Board meetings and speak during public comments, they can help the increase become permanent.
“It would be awesome if we could get students saying ‘thank you’ and sharing how they used the office hours. That would be incredible… They can reach out [to Palomar] to share quick videos or stories… That would be amazing,” she said.
