Pending Board of Trustee approval, Cerritos College will announce a new dean position coming fall 2010.

According to Monica Bellas, the chair of the Anthropology Department, Cerritos College President Linda Lacy sent an e-mail out last week informing the Social Sciences Department that Bryan Reece was tapped for the position.

“We were puzzled because we hadn’t heard anything about it before,” Bellas said.

With the Humanities and Social Sciences Department seemingly out of a dean, the question became who would lead the division.  

Due to budget cuts, the position, according to Lacy, was going to have to be filled in house.

“There needs to be someone there to coordinate the plan we have and make sure the work gets done,” Lacy said.

Bellas said, “We were informed by President Lacy that Humanities and Social Sciences would be combined with the Business Department, and that the current dean of Business, Rachael Mason, will take on both the Humanities/Social Sciences and Business divisions.”

Lacy said, “We have been working on this since August and our No. 1 goal is student success. I am impressed with the faculty [members], they are all engaging. Every single one of them.”

The reason as to why the official position, job title and job description are remaining confidential is because the board has yet to approve any of them.

“The board is aware we are doing it and is in full support,” Lacy said.

Bryan Reece, the current dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said, “Reforming the [Learning Resource Center] has been going on since 2006. It started as a conversation in the faculty senate and continued through three different presidential terms of faculty senate.”

According to Reece the idea for a LRC dean position is a direct result of the Development Education Committee that brought outside consultants from Chaffey College, a school that has successfully revamped its basic skills program.

While not many details about the position have been released, President Lacy shared the plan to create the position.

1.    Create the dean of Academic Success and institutional effectiveness.

2.    Recognize current administration structure and accomplish goals without adding administration positions.

3.    Recognize, based on a fair and equitable distribution of duties and workload.

While the decision is not official, Bellas feels the division has no say in its future. “As a department, we all work really well together.  While we are all on-board with student success, we don’t agree with the process, it feels very Vela (former Cerritos College President) like.”