Community Colleges Face Possible Faculty Layoffs

A deepening budget crisis has put the Los Angeles Community College District’s Board of Trustees in the uncomfortable position of having to decide, just a few weeks before three of its members are up for reelection, whether to lay off faculty members and thereby anger the district’s powerful teachers’ union.

Officials said Wednesday that the district faces a combined deficit of $17 million or more for this year and next. About $6 million in possible program cuts have been identified, they said, but additional cuts--including possible faculty layoffs--will be necessary to balance the budget.

Tom Fallo, vice chancellor for business services, said Gov. George Deukmejian’s veto last year of special aid to college districts with falling enrollments deprived Los Angeles of $9 million that it was counting on this year.

Other problems, Fallo said, included lottery revenues that fell about $3 million short of the district’s projections.

“We’re in a precarious position,” Fallo said, and that may force the board to consider severe measures, such as postponing purchases, selling district land or reducing salary expenditures.

Last year at this time, the board approved the layoffs of 157 tenured instructors, an unpopular move that followed by a few months a decision to dismiss 53 clerical workers and other support staff.

All but two of the tenured instructors eventually were reinstated, but officials of the faculty union, which announced this week that it will oppose two trustees in their campaigns for reelection April 14, said the turmoil caused by the dismissal notices destroyed morale.

Hal Fox, president of the faculty guild, said in an interview earlier this week that layoffs would be very damaging to the district’s nine colleges and that he was doubtful that layoffs were necessary.

Trustee Monroe Richman, one of the two incumbents the faculty union has decided to oppose, said Wednesday that laying off instructors is “the only safety valve we have.” He had planned to raise the issue at Wednesday’s meeting but withdrew it in order to explore other options. The board must make a decision about layoffs soon because the state’s collective bargaining law requires districts to notify employees by March 15 if they might be out of a job by September.

District officials are not optimistic that the state will restore any of the $9 million in declining enrollment aid that it was to receive. Although two Assembly bills that would return $23 million to about a dozen college districts, including Los Angeles, cleared the Assembly Ways and Means Committee earlier this month, the bills received no Republican votes and are opposed by the Republican governor’s Department of Finance.

The district’s financial woes stem from a severe enrollment decline between 1982 and 1986, when it lost about a third of its students and, because state funds are tied to enrollment, a third of its state aid.

Last fall, however, the enrollment picture brightened considerably when officials reported an 11% enrollment increase. Early reports show that spring enrollment is up 22% over last spring, although district spokesman Norm Schneider said that normal attrition may reduce the final figure by about half.

The enrollment upswing will have negative consequences for the district, however, because the state, caught in a budget squeeze itself, will pay for growth of no more than about 1% of total enrollment, Schneider said. That means that the district will receive funding for only 1,000 of the 10,000 new students who enrolled last fall.