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Community college part-timers win victory
Judge gives them credit for out-of-class hours
Friday, February 4, 2000
By RUTH SCHUBERT
Part-time faculty at Washington's community colleges won a significant victory this week in their ongoing legal battle over retirement benefits.
The judge presiding over a class action lawsuit against the state ruled that part-time instructors should be credited for hours worked outside the classroom -- a move that could substantially increase the number of part-time instructors eligible for retirement benefits and cost the state millions of dollars.
The lawsuit will next address whether any instructors were unlawfully denied the benefits.
The issue of how work hours should be calculated is at the heart of the lawsuit, which encompasses part-time faculty who worked from 1977 to the present. The suit against the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges and the state's Department of Retirement Systems was filed in King County Superior Court in December 1998.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs argue that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of instructors were cheated out of benefits because their work hours were calculated incorrectly.
Until recent changes, state law said that part-timers who worked 70 hours a month were entitled to retirement benefits.
The state has long interpreted that to mean 70 hours in the classroom. Lawyers for the part-timers argue that 70 hours a month means half of a full-time workload, based on a 35-hour work week.
"It was a very significant victory, because now we know as a matter of law that these people are eligible for retirement benefits," said Steve Festor, an attorney at Bendich, Stobaugh and Strong, the firm representing the part-time faculty.
"The Attorney General's Office, the state, has continually argued that in-class hours are the only ones that counted."
Attorneys for the state could not be reached for comment yesterday.
To an outsider, the details of the lawsuit can sound numbingly legalistic. But to the part-time instructors who sued, the ruling is a first step toward justice.
"When nobody pays any attention to you for decades, and then all of a sudden someone says, 'Yes, you have been treated unfairly,' it's just a sense of elation," said Eva Mader, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.
Mader has been teaching German at North Seattle Community College since 1978.
For most of that time, she has taught two courses each quarter, compared with the three courses that full-time faculty generally teach.
Since 1983, Mader has been the sole German teacher at the college. But she was never granted retirement benefits until new state regulations went into effect this fall.
The use of part-time faculty in the state's 33 community and technical colleges has expanded rapidly in recent years.
In the fall of 1990, part-time faculty taught 34 percent of all community college courses. By fall 1998, they were teaching 40 percent.
P-I reporter Ruth Schubert can be reached at 206-448-8130 or ruthschubert@seattle-pi.com
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