Chancellor Gilkerson wanted to personally convey the direction she’s taking with district organizational structure and recorded a brief (3 minutes 44 seconds) update video for the Peralta Community. Please watch the video here: https://youtu.be/EDVsTjYeWis.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of Chancellor Gilkerson’s video message:

Hi Peralta Community College District Community.

I hope you're doing well.

I'm about 55 days in as your Chancellor, and wanted an opportunity just to connect with you really briefly, and give you a quick update on a couple of things happening over here at the district.

First of all, I want to say thank you to the colleges who've had me for listening sessions and for all of the faculty and classified professionals who've come out to share your perspectives and give me ideas about areas we can strengthen and things that are going great at each of the campuses. I look forward to completing those listening sessions here in March and bringing information back to the district community as we move forward.

I also want to let you know that you know that certainly, we’ve had a lot of vacancies here at the district office, with places that we need to fill. Part of the last 55 days, and some of those are weekend days, have been spent on really focusing on what the best plan forward is for leadership here at the district office and reading reports that have come in that we've spent, you know, with outside consultants who've told us recommendations, and reading and listening to folks.

I made the decision to move forward with hiring the Chief Operating Officer position here at the district. We currently have this position now, but the focus of that position is really the three areas of district General Services, Finance, and IT, [which] will be combined under the Chief Operating Officer's position providing leadership as the Chief Financial Officer for us. So, we're really looking forward to going out soon to hire and promote getting a great pool for that position and bringing somebody on board who wants to work with our incredible district community and bringing these areas together. By doing this change we will be eliminating the Vice Chancellor of DGS and the Vice Chancellor of Finance & Administration positions. So wanted to also let you know about that change.

We're currently out right now and in the process of hiring the Vice Chancellor of Human Resources. So I'm looking forward to that and want to thank the committee that's been pulled together to help us identify our next Human Resources Vice-Chancellor.

I'm also excited that we're going to be kicking off the process to hire our permanent College of Alameda President. I had a chance to visit College Council yesterday at College of Alameda to make the announcement. But we're really excited that we'll begin doing that search with the hope of identifying our next permanent President and actually moving forward with that position, hopefully, to begin in July for the new academic year. I just really want to thank the College of Alameda community and everyone, the leadership there across the administration, classified professionals, and faculty, and our student leadership for all their work.

And so that's the quick update from me. I look forward to doing presentations at our participatory governance committees, seeing you all. But thanks so much for all the hard work and the incredible commitment you have to our mission.