More teacher trouble

The Butte Community College District board of trustees at a Dec. 10 meeting received petitions signed by more than 3,000 students urging the board to pay part-time instructors for office hours, according to a press release from the part-timers’ union.

More than half of the school’s part-time instructors are not allotted office hours, and those who are “receive a fraction of what our full-time counterparts get,” Stacy Burk, president of the Part Time Faculty Association Local 12, said in the release.

“As a result,” the release continues, “part timers are put in the untenable position of being reduced to suckers or jerks; suckers for letting the District exploit them by giving students office time for free or jerks because they elect to work to contract which does not include office hour time.”

The union says part-time instructors account for 78 percent of the teaching delivered at the school.