Dear Community,

City College’s award-winning student newspaper The Guardsman yesterday reported on a crucial and preventable crisis in the CCSF Chemistry Department, and today AFT is calling on Interim Chancellor Bailey and our elected Board of Trustees to take the urgent action this problem deserves.

Chemistry 32 & 40 are gateway classes to San Francisco’s healthcare and technology sectors. Nursing, Public Health, Biotech, Radiology, Pharmaceutical Tech, Engineering, Medical Assisting, Health Information Technology: they all depend on Chemistry 32 & 40. And last week, for at least the fourth semester in a row, large numbers of students were again locked out of these courses. Why? Because City College leaders have so far failed to solve this problem.

Hiring part-time Chemistry teachers has not and will not work, due to the competitive market for trained Chemists. CCSF has had 6 failed part-time Chemistry searches in the past 7 years, and Chancellor Bailey is again resorting to this already discredited strategy, while droves of students remain locked out.  

San Franciscan voters and our students are done with window dressing and empty slogans. Our City is demanding real leadership and data-driven accountability: it’s time for City College leaders to act accordingly, and that means hiring more full-time Chemistry faculty ASAP. 200 students were locked out of Chemistry 32 last semester. This semester, the registration for Chem 32 & 40 were full within 5 days. Students like Jessica Lemus (see her story here) are trying semester after semester to get the classes necessary to become the trained medical professionals our City needs.

On behalf of all those who couldn’t get into class, current Chem 32 student, MJ Reyes, has started this student petition to ask Chancellor Bailey for full time Chemistry hires. As Trustee Luis Zamora notes in the Guardsman, Chancellor Bailey has set aside $1mil in this year’s budget for enrollment growth, and many millions more are budgeted for vacant staff positions. Meaning there’s room in the budget to make a smart investment in our students and City. CCSF’s College Board meets with the Chancellor and our community tonight–at this meeting, we urge all CCSF leaders to dig into this problem, ask for data, study AFT’s numbers (see here), and act accordingly.

Our students and City should not have to wait another semester: hire more full-time Chemistry faculty now.