The District Diversity Report was reviewed at the monthly Diversity Committee meeting to show how diversity has evolved campus and district-wide from the 2010-2011 semesters to 2015-2016 semesters on campus Wednesday night.

NOCCCD Director of diversity and compliance, Arturo Ocampo, focused mainly on employee and faculty diversity.

Ocampo presented a PowerPoint to the committee to show the level of diversity that Fullerton College, as well as Cypress College and the NOCCCD as a whole has demonstrated within the last six years.

The presentation showed that during the fall 2015 semester in the NOCCCD, 76 percent of students and 44 percent of district employees were “diverse”.

In regard to defining diversity in terms of the report, “31 percent of applicants [potential NOCCCD new hires] were diverse, that basically means anyone that is non-white,” said Ocampo.

Diversity among NOCCCD employees was more prevalent than other local community college districts, with the NOCCCD showing 44 percent diversity versus 36 percent diversity among the other districts.

During the 2015-2016 semesters, out of the over 2,500 employees hired district-wide, 44 percent were diverse.

Ocampo mentioned during his presentation that there are some difficulties in conducting a report like this.

“The problem that we noticed is the first 1,873 of the 4,200-plus applicants [potential NOCCCD new hires] did not indicate their race or ethnicity,” added Ocampo, “That obviously tends to skew the data.”

Ocampo also added that it was usually white candidates that did not disclose their race on the work applications.

Of the 50 percent of the NOCCCD employee candidates that did get hired, 100 percent of the applicants did disclose their race.

Fullerton College Vice President of Student Services Gilbert Contreras asked during the meeting, if there was a reason why the district is still using labels to describe gender, sexual orientation ethnicity and race?

Ocampo said that, “It is going to be an “educational process” to get people to understand that there is not just race, ethnicity and gender, and hopefully you guys [Diversity Committee] can help me do that.”

“I don’t even like saying those,” Ocampo added, “Everyone has diversity and it doesn’t take in account intersections.”

“There could be a gay-white-male or there could be a disabled-white-female to take into account,” explained Ocampo.

When asked how can FC’s student and faculty population become more diverse, Ocampo said, “Student-wise they’re doing really well, it’s a very diverse student population, with students the real diversity question is how do we oppose the achievement gap?”

“To get more compositional diversity for employees, theres a holistic full compliment of things that need to be done.There isn’t one thing that will allow it to happen.”

Ocampo proposed some ideas, “Is the environment welcoming and inclusive? Are the students diverse? Are there things that we’re doing that will attract diverse candidates? We would have to step up our outreach. Is the content of the curriculum something that would attract diverse faculty?”

The next Diversity Committee will be held on Dec. 7 at 3 p.m. in room 229.