Unkind Cuts : Junior College Students Protest Loss of Classes

Cesar Arredondo works during the day, so he counts on night classes at East Los Angeles College for the credits he needs to transfer to UC Berkeley in a year or so.

But for its spring semester, which begins Monday, the college has scheduled 134 fewer classes than the 1,425 it offered a year ago. And most of the dropped classes came from its evening program, even though nearly half of the college’s students only take classes after 4 p.m.

“We don’t have the money to go to a private college,” Arredondo said at a recent campus rally to protest the cuts. He is on long waiting lists for three of the classes he needs and fears that his chances of getting in are slim.

“We need our classes back. That’s the only solution for us,” Arredondo said.

Similar sentiments have been rumbling across the rest of the financially pressed, nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District since last summer, when a divided Board of Trustees adopted a 1990-91 operating budget of about $265 million, balanced largely by deep cuts in all the colleges’ instructional programs. And because it spent nearly all its unrestricted reserves, the district drew a warning and closer scrutiny from the state.

Because of staff contractual obligations and restrictions on how the district spends much of its revenues, officials found themselves with few choices in where to cut, according to Larry Serot, the district’s chief financial officer. So they took away about $10 million in instructional programs--slashing the hours of part-time teachers. That translated into fewer classes, especially in the 523 well-attended evening sessions, the majority of which are taught by part-timers.

When the fall semester opened in September, administrators lopped large numbers of classes from their schedule offerings, from 308 at City College in East Hollywood--the district’s oldest school--to 37 at fledgling Mission College in the northern San Fernando Valley.

Further belt-tightening is going on this spring at all the campuses, but especially at East Los Angeles, where administrators opted to make relatively moderate cuts in the fall program in hopes that more money could be found by spring. When that didn’t happen, they were forced to take more drastic steps for this semester.

Despite a more than 6% reduction in class offerings, fall enrollment districtwide grew 2% in a year, from 108,880 full- or part-time students to 111,485, Chancellor Donald G. Phelps said. Accommodating more students with fewer classes was accomplished by increasing the sizes of the remaining classes wherever possible, thus increasing the workload of the teachers who had escaped the budget ax.

As scores of students found out that the classes they had planned to take were either canceled or full, they began to show up at protest rallies--at City, East L.A. and Trade-Technical campuses--or at board meetings to relay personal accounts of the hardships the cuts were causing them.

Like many other urban community colleges, the institutions in Los Angeles provide a route to a better job or an academic degree; they also offer immigrants a chance to learn English and other skills that they need to become successful new citizens. The schools’ low fees (up to $50 a semester for California residents) and liberal admissions policies--they are open to everyone over 18--make them accessible to many who could not otherwise go to college.

In the Los Angeles system, the largest community college district in the nation, almost 33% of the students enrolled during the fall of 1988 lived in households with annual incomes of $12,000 or less, according to a district survey. Another 26% reported household incomes of between $12,000 and $24,000 a year.

Latinos accounted for 28.5% of those enrolled; blacks made up 18% and Asians 14.3%. Furthermore, the survey found, the native language for 41% of all students was something other than English; 20.7% claimed Spanish as their first language. And 10.2% of all students had lived in the United States less than five years; another 14.9% had lived here between five and 10 years.

More than one-fifth of City College’s students have immigrated to the United States within the last five years. When budget cuts forced the college to drop many of its classes in English as a Second Language, students scrambled to get into other classes--although they were unable to understand the instruction, said longtime psychology professor Bob Kort.

“The tragedy is so many of our students are so determined to get an education that if they can’t get the classes they need, they’ll sign up for something else even if they are not yet ready for it,” Kort said.

He told of a husband and wife from the Soviet Union, both doctors, obviously well-educated but not yet able to understand much English. They struggled through Kort’s psychology class unwilling to give up even though they were failing it.

“(What) many people don’t understand is that many of our students don’t have the options that middle-class students have,” Kort said. “We are their sole educational resource. If they can’t get what they need here, they can’t get in the car and drive to Glendale or Santa Monica. They’re stuck here.”

Classes aren’t the only thing affected by budget problems.

At Pierce College in Woodland Hills, for example, the unique dairy farming program was discontinued and its 30 cows were sold off. President Daniel G. Means said there are only eight gardeners left to tend the 200 acres of the campus outside its agricultural program. A few years ago, the college had twice that number; only 27 custodians remain from a staff that once numbered 50. And he worries about how to keep the library staffed when its only media clerk retires this spring.

“The budget has been tight for the last several years, and now the governor is talking about no (cost-of-living) increase next year,” Means said. “If that happens, we’re really in trouble.”

Despite an increase in money it received from the state this year, the district found itself in arrears in part because it had ended the previous year with almost no unspent funds and had used one-time sources of money to pay for ongoing costs, including raises for teachers and other staff. It also continued to accept more students than the state would pay for.

Last fall, the California Community Colleges system sent a letter chiding the district for operating with such a small reserve fund (currently about $227,000, according to Serot) and ordered it to show what steps it would take to improve its fiscal situation.

“We have them on a sort of informal watch, which was triggered by a number of danger signs,” said state system spokeswoman Ann Reed. The signs included raises higher than the cost-of-living adjustment provided by the state, the nearly depleted reserves and the district’s continuing to enroll more students than the state will pay for under a growth-limit program.

“We are looking carefully at this point, but we do feel it is fixable,” Reed added.

Board President David Lopez-Lee said the district has been reluctant to turn away any more students than absolutely necessary.

“Our primary job is to educate as many students as possible so we’ve just said the heck with it, we’re going to take as many aboard as we can,” Lopez-Lee said. “In the past we’ve been able to absorb (the difference between how many students the state will reimburse the district for and how many the district enrolls) but this year we couldn’t.”

Chancellor Phelps said the board may be forced to re-examine its policy and turn away even more students than the 34,000 applicants it rejected during this school year.

“It ‘s almost a cardinal sin to say so . . . and as an African-American who would not have had the opportunity to hold this job today had it not been for (a community college), it hits me in the gut,” Phelps said. “But with our limited resources we have to start making some very tough decisions.”

He noted that campus presidents have the authority to require full-time teachers to teach more night classes, and that is a way, albeit an unpopular one, to spread future cuts more equitably between day and evening programs.

Phelps said further reducing the district’s central administration and scaling back benefits packages, at least for new employees or retirees, also would help improve the district’s fiscal outlook.

But such measures offer little comfort to the students who last week finished a frustrating registration period.

“All we’re told by our administrators is that these are hard times,” said Pilar Morin, an East Los Angeles College student leader. “Well, really. Economic hardship has been a way of life for most of us in this community.

“But all our lives we’ve been told that education is the key, the way to a better life,” Morin said. “We are not asking for luxuries here. We are asking for the bare essentials. We want our teachers and our classes.”