Moving Forward: Spring Flex Day at SMC
Santa Monica College held its 2026 Spring Professional Development Day, themed “Rooted in Progress: Essential Tools for Growth,” on March 17. The scheduled training event, also known as Departmental Flex Day, provides various resources and professional guidance to the SMC workforce.
Faculty and classified employees participated in a variety of activities and workshops, including a stress management seminar, salsa dancing and interacting with emotional support animals, according to the event’s itinerary. President and Superintendent Kathryn Jeffery also delivered a speech addressing the state of the college.
As Jeffery took the stage to deliver the State of the College address, faculty members staged a walkout in support of the classified employees who received layoff notices from the institution on March 15. Alexandra Tower, a life science professor who’s taught at SMC for 15 years, said the walkout was organized by faculty to express their disapproval of how the college’s upper management has handled layoffs. Stating that faculty “are just opposed to all the cuts that they’ve made in the way they’ve made it.”
“Walking out is their right to do so; staying here is your right to do so. What I want to say to you is, I respect both positions. I don’t need to try to judge it. I just need to witness it,” Jeffrey said during her speech.
In the State of the College address, Jeffery acknowledged the college’s structural deficit and its decline in student enrollment. She also highlighted SMC’s designation as a California Black-Serving Institution, as well as the expansion of its Homeless Services Work program, which received $355,000 from United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
“I do see brighter days for SMC,” Jeffery said.
The opening session ended with a presentation from Emily Hernandez, director of Employee Assistance Services for Education, titled “Navigating Transitions.” Hernandez provided stress management counseling for employees going through times of change, explaining the physiological effects of stress in the workplace, such as burnout. The workshop also featured a brief meditation exercise.
Cindy Ordaz, president of the California School Employees Association, said that the campus community is in a “difficult moment,” and noted the low morale among classified staff and faculty.
“I know that people are hurting, and some of our colleagues are carrying stress, frustration, and an emotional weight that no one can see,” Ordaz said during a speech at the opening session.
Lunch, catered by Corsair Café, featured puppies and kittens in the quad to interact with, provided by Paws-To-Share.
Flex day featured two breakout sessions at the end of the day, with additional workshops for staff to attend. “Assessing Servingness 2.0 in Practice at HSIs,” led by Gina Garcia, professor at University of California, Berkeley, evaluated SMC’s progress toward implementing servingness, an institutional framework created to improve the academic outcomes of Latino students at federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
Garcia says servingness is rooted in equity, unity and justice. “I think servingness, for me, is like a thread that we can take through the times,” she said during an in-lecture group exercise.
Garcia, who has a doctorate in higher education, said that the field has entered a “moment of retrenchment.” in the midst of legislative efforts by the Trump administration in 2025 to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives within higher education, servingness is grounded in ideas such as social equity, without explicitly using the term, she said
It’s a framework Garcia said people can get behind. “People like the term,” she said, “They’re like, ‘okay, we need to serve our students, right,’ and I say, yes, equitably.’”
“Burnout to Breakthrough: A Wellbeing & Resilience Workshop,” hosted by Susan Finley, a counseling professor at SMC, focused on positive ways to manage stress and prevent burnout. The talk covered breathing exercises, sleep hygiene and stressed the importance of meaningful relationships with colleagues, friends and family as healthy ways to mitigate stress.
Finley said having a chat with colleagues at work, and not discussing work, is a good way to strengthen friendships with colleagues and avoid fixating on work at all times.
She also said that getting a full eight hours of sleep each night is critical to staying healthy. Finley also cited a study from NASA that found 26 minutes is the optimum amount of nap time, providing three hours of extra energy and improved feelings of rejuvenation.
Six economic, social and political science professors from SMC led a panel titled “The First 250: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” which discussed positive and negative trends within the American experience.
According to Rebecca Romo, a sociology professor, a positive aspect of American democracy is the many civil and financial freedoms women and people of color have gained over the last century.
In discussing the “bad” of living in the U.S., Romo pointed to the rising cost of living and wage disparity nationwide. Romo added that she feels the idea of the American Dream is dying.
“Even for my own 24-year-old son, who has a college degree, he’s struggling to find a job. He’s applied to over 90 jobs. He’s getting email rejections almost every day. He works at a restaurant for minimum wage.”
For the “ugly” section of the “First 250” panel, Paul Klumpe, a philosophy professor, cited aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency, including the current use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, and the U.S. - Israel war with Iran.
“If there’s any silver lining here, for me, it’s that Trump makes clear that values we have largely taken for granted and have, indeed, treated as kind of soft or milquetoast, they have to be reinterpreted and defended for the 21st century,” Klumpe said during the panel.
Afterward, Derek Eckstein, a union labor relations representative, held a “CSEA: Know Your Rights!” seminar for those impacted by possible layoffs. Eckstein reviewed the union's history and its series of wins for workers. He also detailed the legal ways in which workers could challenge potential layoffs.
According to Eckstein, senior staff members are given the opportunity to “bump” junior staff members out of their position in order to remain employed, often for a pay cut. Eckstein said that members occasionally express feeling bad about doing this, but that it is fair for employees with more seniority to continue their employment.
Laura Cannelias, a dance instructor at SMC, led one of the final workshops of Flex Day with a salsa dancing class. Classified and faculty members who attended learned basic salsa steps and partner combinations inside SMC’s Core Performance Center.
“Dancing has saved me so many times, when I’ve had difficult situations in life,” Cannelias said. “It’s a good relief from the daily stresses of life, it really is.”