City College administration put more power in the hands of department chairs to decide how many courses to offer in hopes of making the dual-summer sessions more efficient.

Marilynn Spaventa, interim executive vice president, discussed the updates on Wednesday at a shortened Academic Senate meeting.

“In the past, the deans got all of the data from the previous term, the previous summer or the previous fall and deans sat with the EVP [executive vice president] and went through course by course,” Spaventa said.

The deans would then look at enrollment numbers and make decisions about how many courses should be offered based on the previous enrollment. Then deans would give the department chairs a number of teacher work units which determine how many courses they could offer, and they would make the decisions of which courses to offer.

“What we changed now is that the deans have all that data to meet with the department chairs, and review it together,” Spaventa said.

Now the department chairs will be making decisions on the courses offered. They will be able to determine how many units they need for the session.

“The department chair will have much more information to make the decisions on,” Spaventa said. “So it’s not, we can offer this many TLU’s [teacher loading units], its we should have more here and less there.”

The senate is hoping that this will make the sessions more efficient because there will be courses offered in the right places.

“We really changed that process and we hope it’s going to be really effective,” Spaventa said. “Communicating in the process that our enrollment is dropping and what worked for many years is suddenly not working.”