Budget Cuts and the Pierce College Paper

Item: The Los Angeles Community College District passed its budget recently and in the process managed to cut the funding for campus newspaper by 50%.

I’m not terribly surprised. After all, a district that is moving in the direction of disaster wouldn’t want such information to reach its students by way of campus newspapers. The budget cut is also a very convenient way to silence its most critical of critics--the student press.

I am reminded of the fall semester of 1978, soon after the hysteria of the passage of Proposition 13 in June of that year. At that time, I was editor of the Pierce College newspaper, the Roundup, and panic pervaded the newsroom. However, we survived because of tenacity. We cut back on the number of pages of each edition and had less photo pages, but we still managed to tell the student population about the operations of the Board of Trustees and the district office.

As I remember it, that year the district couldn’t seem to find $1 million in accounts receivable for the fiscal year 1977-78. And, despite a 30% budget cut alone for the 1978 Pierce summer session (the other eight colleges were cut, too), the district still managed to move in the spring of 1979 to its new headquarters with a jump in office space from 60,000 to 105,000 square feet. This included a very plush new office for Chancellor Leslie Koltai.

It seemed, at that time, that the board had far more concern for the district offices than it did for its students who began finding cut classes and teachers who couldn’t come up with enough supplies to conduct classroom business.

In a survey conducted by the Roundup that year, of the six largest districts in the state, the LACCD had one administrator at district headquarters for every 2,310 students, by far the largest amount in the state. At San Francisco CCD, which was the next highest in the state, the ratio was 7,112 students per one district administrator.

That was in 1979, but I’m willing to bet not much has changed and the LACCD is still top-heavy with administrators while the colleges are going down the tubes.

What amazes me is that the board never looks at how successful a program is before cutting it to shreds. No matter that most of the district’s newspapers are award-winning, with Pierce and Valley continuously named as the top community-college newspapers in the nation. It also doesn’t matter that the journalism programs send their students immediately out into the work force--first to local dailies and then on to large communications organizations, often without further education.

But it’s business as usual with the board: Cut the programs and keep the district intact.

However, knowing the caliber of the journalism program at Pierce, the Roundup will continue to bite at the heels of the district despite the budget crunch. It’s too bad that the heels of the district are lined with dead weight.

GERRY BRAILO SPENCER

Moorpark