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State budget cuts to community colleges called 'disastrous' — but satellite campus in Mountain House will not be derailed.
 San Joaquin Delta College. Tracy Press file photo
“Neither choice is a good one,” Delta College
President Raul Rodriguez said today. “If we wipe out summer school, we cut
instructional and support services to thousands of students. If we dip into our
reserves, we may put ourselves into a difficult position down the road, as the
next two budget years are projected to be difficult ones, and we may need those
reserves to make it through.”
Either way,
the college’s 20,000 students are in for some drops in service.
State
officials announced last week an $84.4 million budget cut to California’s 109 community colleges. The
news came in the last quarter of the fiscal year, timing Rodriguez calls “disastrous.”
“The timing is critical,” Rodriguez said. “Most of
the money for the year has already been spent or is committed. To try and
make any rational cuts at this point is extremely difficult.”
This year, Delta College
maintained a $97 million operating budget. It has $6.7 million in reserve.
 Students at Delta College. Tracy Press file photo
For at least one more school year, public schools
are expected to face dire straits, said Theresa Tena, director of fiscal policy
for the Community College League of California, in a statement issued this week.
That’s why the potential of drying up reserve money has schools scrambling to
find alternatives.
Like
educators and administrators throughout the state, Rodriguez awaits the final
decision from the capitol about whether the cuts drafted in January will
actually be enacted.
Plans to open
a Delta College satellite campus in Mountain
House this fall will not be derailed by the setbacks, Rodriguez said. A portion
of $250 million in bonds will pay for that.
The budget
slash could limit the number and range of courses the school would be able to
offer once it opens, however, he added.
About 9
percent of Delta College students live in Tracy and
Mountain House, according to the school researchers. That’s about 1,600
students.
College
officials expect enrollment to hover between 3,000 and 4,000 at the satellite
campus when it opens this year.
With
roughly $5,700 for each new student, community colleges already get the least
per-student funding out of any state institution. Four-year colleges get
$12,000 per student, public universities $19,000 and kindergarten-through-grade-12
gets $8,500, based on last year’s figures.
Under the budget
crunch, spending at two-year colleges will be reduced by $72 per student.
Community
colleges serve 2.6 million students in California.
Because of
its timing and the sheer dollar amount the school is expected to drop, it’s the
worst cutback in recent memory, Rodriguez said.
Six years
ago, when Rodriguez first got to Delta, the school faced a similar crisis. The
state ordered the school to cut $4.7 million. The college enacted spending and
hiring freezes and spent 2 percent of its reserves, putting it on the state’s
watch list. Delta also laid off part-time employees and “severely” cut class
schedules, Rodriguez said.
Still, he
added, this year looks worse. That is, if the statewide proposals go through as
drafted.
Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger will announce a final draft next month.
Compared with
other colleges, Delta’s future seems a little more manageable. A couple
counties in Southern California face deficits
between $4 million and $7.5 million.
To compound
the problem, the state’s four-year schools recently barred enrollment of at
least 10,000 students to manage their own fiscal crisis. Since the two-year
schools cannot legally turn applicants away, those students will have to wait
in longer lines to get into the classes they need, said Ron Owens, spokesman
for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.
“In terms
of human capital, it’s the equivalent of 52,000 fewer students being served,”
Owens said. “Because they can enroll, community colleges have open enrollment,
but they might get turned away from that class or any prerequisites they want
to take.”
To soften
the blow, community colleges are looking at raising money from the private
sector.
Taking a
page from state universities and colleges, the Foundation
for California Community Colleges plans to lessen two-year schools’ dependence
on state money.
“With
the statewide budget cuts, we’re beginning to realize that we can’t rely on
public money in itself,” said Paul Lanning, president and CEO of the 10-year-old
foundation.
State
universities and colleges rely mostly on private support and business revenue,
he said.
“They’re
not technically state schools anymore; they’re state-assisted.”
For
community colleges, that shift could take decades, Lanning noted. But it’s a
change that the state foundation spearheaded last fall.
“It’s
imperative for us to look elsewhere for support,” Lanning said. “We have
greater needs than CSUs and UCs; we have a greater student population. Yet we
receive less funding per student. Given that dynamic, we have to supplement
what we get from the state.”
Lanning
said he’s optimistic about garnering millions from his target market, private
investors.
It
would make sense, Lanning said, for a corporation looking for welders,
technicians, nurses or other products of vocational training, to invest in the
schools that provided it.
• We want to hear what you have to say.
To reach Tracy Press reporter Jennifer Wadsworth,
call 830-4225 or e-mail
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