A third of California community college districts sued by part-time faculty
After four years of battling in court, part-time faculty members reached an $18 million settlement with the Long Beach Community College District earlier this year over what they called a failure to compensate them for work done outside the classroom. They spend hours preparing for lectures, grading student work and communicating with students through the week, they said, but are only paid for “classroom hours.”
Now, part-time faculty across the California Community College system are following in their footsteps. At present, there are at least five other active lawsuits against the California Community Colleges Board of Governors or specific community college districts over the same issue. Together, these lawsuits name about a third of the system’s 73 districts.
According to Dan Galpern, one of the attorneys representing part-time faculty members, more lawsuits are likely on their way. He said there were several other districts that he believed were “also violating the law” and the team of attorneys working on these cases were “considering undertaking enforcement actions.”
“The overall mosaic is really seeking to get recompense for all of these part-time professors that have been under-compensated systemically. So it’s really a large effort,” said attorney Glenn Danas, who is working with Galpern. Both of them, and the firms they represent, were not involved in the Long Beach case.
The lawsuits, which mirror each other and have been filed by the same coalition of attorneys, are centered around the alleged lack of payment for non-classroom work like grading, lesson prep and communicating with students. Part-timers are paid on an hourly basis only for work done in the classroom and a “limited number of other instructional activities.”
The complaints say the districts are aware that outside-of-classroom work is essential to part-time faculty’s teaching effectiveness and subject them to evaluations for which that work is necessary. Since part-timers are rehired based on performance, these evaluations gain even more significance. Still, the districts do not pay them for that work, the part-timers say, and allege that their pay amounts to lower than minimum wage compensation for all the hours worked.
They add that districts have the same expectations of outside-classroom work from their full-time and part-time faculty members. However, full-timers are compensated for those hours through their annual salary.
Same work, fraction of the pay
A part-time faculty member — often known as an “adjunct” — is a temporary employee who teaches up to 67% of a full-time faculty assignment per term at community colleges, per California Education Code. Data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office shows that more than two-thirds of the system’s 60,000 academic employees in Fall 2025 were temporary or part-timers. The number of part-timers has been more than double the number of tenure or tenure-track faculty for at least the last 25 years.
But these part-time faculty members, on whom the system so heavily depends, say they are not being compensated fairly. Struggling to make ends meet, many of them travel far distances every day to teach at colleges miles apart, earning them the moniker “freeway flyers.” In addition to the uncertainty of non-permanent status, many of them also do not have benefits like health insurance.
“People like me, we’re only hired for one semester, we’re let go and then we’re hired again the next semester,” said John Martin, one of the plaintiffs and chair of the California Part-Time Faculty Association. “Between each semester, we’re eligible to apply for unemployment insurance. Most community colleges don’t give us healthcare or office hours (compensation). So in other words: We’re doing almost the same amount of work as full-timers and yet we get a fraction of what they get.”
Martin has worked as a part-time professor of U.S. history and African American history since 1999 at Shasta College and since 1994 at Butte College. In addition to all his teaching duties, Martin drives hundreds of miles every week between the two campuses.
In the Shasta-Tehama-Trinity Joint Community College District, hourly wage for a part-time faculty member ranged from $67 to $85 in the 2025-2026 school year. In the Butte-Glenn district, it ranged from $75 to $101 per hour based on faculty members’ credentials and experience. Typically, a full-time teaching load is 15 units. For a part-time instructor in the Shasta district who teaches three three-unit classes per week, then, weekly pay would be somewhere between $600 and $765. For the same instructor in the Butte district, weekly pay would fall between $675 and $909. This calculation accounts for one hour of in-class teaching per week per unit and no additional compensation for other instructional activities like office hours.
For a full-time instructor in the Shasta district, who typically teaches 15 units in a term, weekly pay ranged from $1,814 and $3,909. In the Butte district, it ranged from $1,959 to $4,290 per week. This calculation used annual salary ranges divided by the number of work weeks.
Through class actions, the lawsuits seek to recover for all part-time faculty “the pay owed to them for their considerable uncompensated work.” This includes “unpaid minimum wages,” related contributions to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, interest, liquidated damages, penalties, attorneys’ fees and costs of suit, the lawsuits say.
For those leading the charge, the end goal is for districts to change the compensation structure for part-timers so they are paid for all the hours they work — inside and outside the classroom. Many districts do not track work hours for part-timers outside the classroom, attorney Galpern said, so they are not even aware of how many hours their employees are working.
A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office said the system would not comment on pending litigation. In court, the California Community Colleges Board of Governors has sought to get the cases against it dismissed on the grounds that it is not the employer of part-time faculty. Instead, it is the local community college’s board of trustees that are responsible, the board of governors said. The lawsuits name the board on account of its “standard-setting, oversight and policy implementing role.”
Meanwhile, the named community college districts — which includes Los Rios, Sierra Joint and San Joaquin Delta districts — are responding in different ways. Some, like Santa Clarita, have come to the table and already negotiated a settlement. Others, like Mt. San Antonio and San Diego, have denied every allegation, asserted that they complied with all payment obligations under contract, and asked the court for relief.
Legislative action for long-term solutions
The issue of inadequate pay and working conditions for part-time faculty is not only in court; it has also made its way into the Legislature over the past few years. In 2021 and 2024, bills to increase the cap on part-time faculty course load from 67% to 85% of a full-time assignment so they could work more in a single district were vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on account of the fiscal impact of updating bargaining agreements at each district. Instead, Newsom increased funding for a part-time faculty health insurance program in 2022 by $200 million in ongoing funds.
Now, a bill currently in the state Senate seeks to keep any unspent funds from the program in a newly created fund instead of being reverted to the General Fund. The bill, AB 1171, would mandate that these deposited funds continue to be used for the part-time faculty program and expand it such that all districts begin negotiations by 2030 to offer health insurance benefits to adjuncts.
The state budget has also provided annual, ongoing funds to support districts in making part-time faculty salaries more comparable to full-time salaries for similar work since 2020. The funding is distributed proportional to student population within each district.
As the statewide conversation around compensation and work conditions for part-time faculty grows, Long Beach City College art history instructor Seija Rohkea is all set to head to court July 1 to seal the deal on the $18 million settlement. She is one of two plaintiffs in that defining case supported by the California Teachers Association.
After the court’s approval, the 1,400 people employed by the district as adjunct faculty between 2019 and 2025 could begin receiving their individual settlements by the end of the year. But for Rohkea, she said what was most exciting was fighting for what she believed was right and setting a precedent that could change the statewide system.
