L.A. Community College Board Plans Layoffs of Faculty

The trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District have decided for the first time to lay off 140 to 300 tenured instructors, a move designed both to save money and to expand popular evening programs, it was learned Thursday.

Since 1982, the nine-campus district has lost more than a third of its students, but board members, all seven of whom were elected with the backing of the faculty union, had in the past resisted suggestions that the full-time faculty be reduced.

But with enrollment down again this spring and a budget deficit looming next year, board members say they have no choice but to begin faculty cutbacks.

“This is strictly a question of responding to what is necessary,” said Monroe Richman, president of the board. “We have many programs that don’t enjoy much student support, so we have had to make some very hard decisions.”

Officials say the district has too many full-time instructors in subjects such as physical education and the humanities, most of whom teach during the day. At the same time, it lacks the money to hire instructors to teach popular evening classes in fields such as computer science and business administration.

“This should be seen as part of an overall educational restructuring of this community college district,” said board member Lindsay Conner. “We have to more closely align the faculty with student demand. That is critical for us to compete effectively with surrounding colleges.”

The Los Angeles colleges have been losing thousands of students to two-year colleges in Santa Monica, Pasadena, Glendale and El Camino in Torrance, in part, officials say, because those schools offer more of the courses that students want.

Under the state’s collective bargaining law, the district must notify employees by March 15 if they may be laid off by next September. In closed meetings Sunday and Wednesday, board members have been poring over lists of faculty members who might get the dismissal notices.

Officials say that they have agreed privately to go ahead with large-scale layoffs, but the action must be publicly debated and voted on at the board’s next meeting Feb. 5.

The district has about 1,700 full-time faculty members, and officials say they have talked of sending out 140 to 300 layoff notices.

“I have heard everything from 20 to 400,” said Hal Fox, president of the American Federation of Teachers College Guild, the faculty union. “Personally, I don’t think this is justified by any of the considerations they are citing. It is a momentous step for this district. They have avoided this sort of posture before.”

Fox acknowledged that the colleges offer many classes with enrollments of fewer than 10 students, but eliminating those classes may lead to a further enrollment decline, he said.

“If we don’t offer a balanced program, students will go elsewhere,” he said. “I think this is a lay board that doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

But board members say the continuing enrollment slide has left them with few choices. As of last week, the nine colleges had 80,725 students enrolled, down from 84,176 during the same week last year. In 1982, the district enrolled about 139,000 students.

Last month, the board voted to furlough all of its administrators for two weeks in the spring, a move that is equivalent to a 4% pay cut. Earlier, it voted to lay off 53 clerical and support employees.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday, district budget director Tom Fallo told the board that the deficit for next year could range from $2 million to $8.7 million. His report suggested a variety of options to cut spending, including reducing Mission College in San Fernando and Southwest College to “instructional centers” that would be operated by staff members from another college.

But board members said neither option is being seriously considered. Instead, they said the board has agreed to faculty layoffs as the best way to reduce spending.

Loss of Ideas Seen

“The unfortunate thing is that our newest people, those with fresh ideas, will be the first ones to go,” said board member Harold Garvin, noting that the district will dismiss those instructors with the least seniority. “We will also lose a lot of good part-time people like our coaches,” he added, since the district must lay off the remaining part-time teachers in a particular field before it dismisses any full-time instructors.

Several programs, such as nursing, may disappear entirely from some campuses.

“We are going to regionalize certain programs. In a program with a low enrollment, there is just no reason to offer the same thing at all nine campuses,” said Conner, a Los Angeles attorney.