Merced College board approves settlement agreement over back pay to faculty members

The Merced Community College Board unanimously approved a settlement agreement on Tuesday that will pay out more than $70,000 to faculty members whose “overload” pay was calculated inconsistently, according to board meeting documents.

The settlement agreement will be distributed among 27 faculty members across various disciplines. The agreement comes after a computer science instructor filed a November claim with the college board about discrepancies in how instructors from different programs are compensated for overload, according to settlement documents.

Simply put, overload refers to the pay an instructor receives for teaching more than the normal level of classes. Overload pay is calculated based on not just the number of classes an instructor teaches, but also the number of class sections, the start date of the class, whether there’s another instructor teaching that class and the number of units a class is worth. All of those factors serve to increase the amount of time an instructor teaches during the semester and the amount of work the instructor does.

“In order to apply something across the board, we went through and pulled out every single person to figure out how theirs was calculated,” said Kelly Avila, vice president of human resources at Merced College. “Whether or not lab is assigned in their primary load is really the difference in pay.”

While the computer science instructor’s claim was regarding strictly her own overload pay, the college board opted to settle with the 27 affected faculty members so as not to receive any more claims or get tied up in litigation, the settlement said.

“I think this is a good resolution,” said Carmen Ramirez, Merced College Board member for Area 3. “Anytime you can avoid litigation, it helps both sides. The agreement is a job well done.”

The faculty member who filed the claim previously taught in the career and technical education field at Merced College, the settlement said, before moving into a teaching position in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field. Upon starting her new position, she found that her overload pay was calculated differently.

The faculty member’s claim asked for $37,367.50 in overload pay after recalculating how her overload was determined from the Spring of 2010 through Spring 2021. The amount she claimed she was owed after recalculating her overload pay from the previous 11 years was in line with a district policy stating that if an accounting error results in underpayment to an employee, the college pays the employee all back pay, the settlement goes on to say.

The college denied that there was any payroll error, and that her overload pay was calculated differently than overload pay in her current job per a college policy. That policy has different methods of determining overload pay from discipline to discipline. The faculty member who filed the claim received a total of $4,813 in overload pay for the Spring 2020 through Fall 2021 semesters, according to the settlement.

The instructor who filed the claim last November could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.