According to a recent ruling by the state employment relations board, NOCCCD unlawfully discriminated and retaliated against the United Faculty members Katie King from Fullerton College, United Faculty NOCCCD President Christie Diep, and Linda Borla from Cypress College when they were engaging in protected union activities by requesting to teach English courses at Cypress College in the 2023-2024 winter intersession.
According to the allegation, NOCCCD’s unlawful retaliation and discrimination included denying requests to teach winter intersession courses, which violated state law by interfering with union members’ rights to request winter intersession courses.
Dispute over winter session request
In the past years, the district has offered fall, summer, and spring term classes, but not winter sessions. In 2023, the district introduced a four-week winter intersession. King, Diep and Borla, who all had leadership roles in the faculty union at the time, submitted the interest form for teaching English courses during intersession.
According to the allegation, the district later questioned why the three union leaders all wanted to teach during the winter intersession and said that the requests seemed odd.
In early October 2023, Cypress College’s previous Vice President of Instruction Kathleen Reiland had a conversation with Diep, then the faculty union president. In the conversation, Reiland asked Diep to reduce her request to teach from two classes to one class, according to public documents reviewed by The Hornet
Reiland also denied Borla’s request to teach a film course during the winter intersession since there are two sections offered in the spring, according to documents. Borla was told by an administrator that holding the film class during the intersession had a potential impact on the opportunities for adjunct faculty to teach during the spring semester, according to Borla’s recounting of the events in the PERB documents.
Borla responded that it is not appropriate for the administration to require her not to teach winter intersession courses and lose the opportunity to earn income just to ensure other faculty would have the opportunity to earn more during the conventional semester.
According to the NOCCCD union contract, the course scheduling decisions are made by the immediate management supervisor. Full-time faculty and union members can participate in campus decision-making and have access to file grievances when disputes arise, while the adjunct faculty are temporary employees who are only assigned classes on a term-by-term basis. Christie, King and Borla are all full-time faculty.
Other documents show that Cypress College administrators say they declined to offer the sections of ENGL 100 in the winter intercession to ensure full-time faculty would be able to teach their full load of 15 units in the spring.
On Oct. 3, 2023, Diep and Borla filed a grievance with the Public Employment Relations Board, a state body that oversees union-employer relations, alleging that the district failed to follow the course scheduling process for intersession, which is discriminatory against the rights of union faculty members.
According to an Oct. 17 email from NOCCCD Vice Chancellor of Human Resources Irma Ramos to Diep, the administration denied the course requests because the success rate for English 100 courses at Cypress College does not support offering the winter session courses. She included a chart showing declining rates of students passing the class.
“This is just a foundational core class,” said Diep, in an interview with The Hornet, who wanted to teach an English class. “How can anyone say we’re not going to offer it all because we don’t think any student can be successful. It goes so against everything that I believe as an educator, as a teacher.”
“It’s very unfair because I’ve taught accelerated courses for quite a while now, and I think it’s based on a false assumption about our students,” said Borla to The Hornet
NOCCCD’s reasoning and PERB findings
In Vice Chancellor Irma Ramos’s email, she mentioned that a four-week intersession is not long enough to teach an English course, so the administration will postpone it until a six-week winter session is scheduled.
According to the PERB filing, the administration expressed concerns that offering three or more unit courses in a four-week intersession could be too much for students, based on the past intersession course survey.
On Oct. 6, 2023, the scheduled winter intersession courses for Cypress College were officially released, and none of the English courses requested by Diep, Borla, and King were included. However, Fullerton College’s winter schedule included multiple four-unit courses and included an English course, according to the complaint filed with PERB.
The PERB decision, published Dec. 11, 2025, found that the district violated these faculty members’s rights, “because of their protected activity of serving as officers and/or representatives of their exclusive representative, United Faculty/CCA/CTA/NEA (United Faculty) and thereby denying United Faculty its right to represent employees; and bypassing United Faculty and dealing directly with employees regarding their intersession teaching requests.”
As a remedy, the district was required to compensate all the losses for Diep and Borla from Cypress College, and King from Fullerton College, for at least one course that they were not able to teach during the intersession as a result of the denial of their winter intersession courses request.
In an NOCCCD Board Meeting in November 2025, the faculty members Jeremy Peters and Elizabeth Putman from Cypress College were still fighting to offer English 100 during the winter intersession.
According to the NOCCCD online schedule, Cypress College offered approximately 123 English courses in the spring 2026 semester and three 3-unit English courses in the 2026 winter intercession.
Former Cypress College Vice President of Instruction Kathleen Reiland, the NOCCCD Vice Chancellor of Human Resources Irma Ramos, and NOCCCD Chancellor Byron D. Clift Breland did not respond to requests for comment.
