Vision
In August 2025, Peralta Community College District Chancellor Dr. Tammeil Gilkerson shared a vision for the District based on input she'd received from students, faculty, classified professionals, administrators, and community members over the previous 18-months. Here is the vision:
Act with vision and purpose to create a unified, equity-centered district—streamlining programs, aligning resources, and forging clear, student-first pathways that remove barriers, accelerate success, and set a new standard for community college excellence.
Watch the Chancellor's August address here:
To make this vision our reality, the District Transformation Plan will focus on six specific areas and leverage our new and innovative Shared Governance model. The six areas are:
- Course & Program Assessment: We will ensure every program and course is strong, sustainable, and strategically placed to serve students best— reducing duplication without reducing opportunity.
- Evening & Weekend College: We will create an Evening & Weekend College so students can access education beyond the traditional 9–5, meeting them where they are in their lives.
- Distance Education: We will consolidate distance education into one coordinated system, so students experience consistent quality, clear expectations, degree pathways, and strong support no matter where they log in.
- Dual Enrollment: We will establish one central point of coordination for dual enrollment, streamlining partnerships with schools and ensuring students have equitable access to high-quality pathways into college.
- Concurrent Enrollment (High School & 4-Year): We will expand opportunities for high school students to begin their college journey early, and we will support adults in completing the degrees they started.
- Unification: We will unify our colleges to operate as a stronger district— maintaining distinct campus identities while eliminating fragmentation and competition for the same students.
Chancellor Gilkerson elaborated on the vision at the Shared Governance Summit in September and during the Chancellor's District Service Center Roadshow visits to each of the colleges. The Roadshow slides are available here.
Dr. Gilkerson noted that on Flex Day, people heard “Oakland City College” and unfortunately didn’t give much attention to the five other areas of opportunity that are essential for unification. She clarified that by doing all these things, we will transform to make three stronger colleges with less fragmentation and competition, and greater focus on students and their success. The work to be done by our shared governance committees and task forces will set the district for long-term sustainability – for students, employees, and the community we serve.
Recommendations for Course & Program Assessment and Evening & Weekend College will be made by the Student Success & Enrollment Management Committee.
Recommendations for Distance Education will be made by the Distance Education Taskforce.
Recommendations for Dual Enrollment and Concurrent Enrollment (High School & 4-Year) will be made by the Dual and Concurrent Enrollment Taskforce.
Recommendations for Unification will be made by the Unification Taskforce.
Data Summit and Upcoming Meetings
Data Summit. On November 3, 2025, there was a Transformation Data Meeting in the District Atrium, where a tremendous amount of information from our Institutional Research Colleagues was shared to help inform the work underway by all the taskforce and committee members working on the Transformation Plan. Slides presented are posted here. The Zoom recording is posted here (Note: there is a breakout activity for in-person attendees that takes place from 41:50 to 55:40 so might want to skip that section). Employees can click here to access the Dual and Concurrent Enrollment Dashboard in PowerBI. Photos of the Data Summit are posted in SmugMug here.
Employees can click here for access to the PCCD Unification SharePoint site, which includes additional data resources for Peralta's Transformation Plan, including specific areas for the Data Summit, the Distance Education Taskforce, the Dual & Concurrent Enrollment Taskforce, SSEMC, and the Unification Taskforce. (Peralta employee login credentials are needed to access SharePoint).
- November 14, 2025, from 9am to 10:30am. There will be a Student Success and Enrollment Management Committee (SSEMC) meeting in the District Boardroom. See the agenda on BoardDocs here.
- November 20, 2025 - the Dual and Concurrent Enrollment Taskforce will meet. Visit their site for details.
- November 24, 2025 - the Distance Education Taskforce will meet. Visit their site for details.
- December 11, 2025, from 12pm to 2pm. There will be a Unification Taskforce Meeting in the District Boardroom.
Background
Why is Peralta pursuing this Transformation Plan? We simply must transform the District to better support the students in our community in a long-term, financially sustainable way. For more than a decade, Peralta's costs for providing an outstanding education to students have exceeded our income. Chancellor Gilkerson and Deputy Chancellor & COO Greg Nelson gave a presentation to the Peralta Board of Trustees in October 2024 that explained our current situation. You can watch it on YouTube here, while the slides are posted here.
During that talk, PCCD was compared to other four-college districts noting that PCCD has less than half the full-time equivalent (FTE) students of State Center CCD and less than a third of the FTE students of Los Rios CCD (see slide 17). Similarly sized districts across the state tend to have only one or two colleges (see slide 19).
Financially, the District has had budget challenges every year dating back at least to FY2013-14.
That presentation concluded with the call for "Moonshot Thinking" because we have already "cut to the bone."
Some very important and difficult decisions were made during the 2024-25 fiscal year that resulted in sufficient savings to provide a two-year "runway" to work on the District's Transformation Plan without additional anticipated budget cuts for FY2025-26 and FY2026-27. Those decisions included a reduction in force, a resignation incentive, refinancing and paying down Other Post Employment Benefits (OPEB) debt, and most creatively, changing Peralta's reserve policy (allowing the District to tap into reserve funds in the short term and gradually replenish the reserve over the next several years).
Those decisions bought us time to utilize our innovative new Shared Governance model to plan for the District's transformation collaboratively -- together.
As a result of those changes, the bond rating agencies of Fitch and Standard & Poor have both improved PCCD's bond rating two steps (from AA- to AA+) with a Positive Outlook. That upgrade in bond rating benefits the District when we sell Measure G Bonds to fund building projects like the recently opened Horticulture Center at Merritt College and the Transportation Technology Center at College of Alameda. The higher the bond rating, the more money investors pay for those bonds.
Timeline
The District shared governance committees and the new taskforces will be working on recommendations for the Transformation plan over several months with the goal to present preliminary recommendations at the next Shared Governance Summit on February 27, 2026, at Merritt College. The formal recommendations are expected to go to the Planning & Budgeting Committee for consideration later that Spring, so the PBC can submit final recommendations to the Chancellor by the end of the Spring semester.
The Unification taskforce will likely continue into 2026-27, while the work from the other two taskforces will conclude in the Spring 2026 semester.
The changes to the District are expected to take effect with the Fall 2027 semester.
Chancellor Gilkerson and COO Nelson have had preliminary meetings with the state chancellor's office, and with the accreditors (ACCJC). Those preliminary meetings went very well, with leadership from those organizations being very supportive of the changes planned for the Peralta Colleges.
