Classroom Space at a Premium : Community colleges: Registration lines this summer lengthen as the space crunch at 4-year campuses spreads to the area’s 2-year schools.

When a Valley College spokeswoman got to work at 7 a.m. one recent day, she encountered 700 or so students, many of whom had camped outside the administration building the night before to get first crack at summer school classes.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Shannon Stack said Monday. “Here we all were, just waiting for the doors to open. We’ve never seen anything like it before.”

Such scenes have been common this summer at community colleges throughout the San Fernando, Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys, as thousands of students crowded out of university classes have tried to enroll in summer school.

But instead of the wide-open classes common in the past, they are finding that the space crunch at four-year colleges and universities induced by budget cuts has spread to the community colleges, and that the chance of even getting on a waiting list is slim and growing slimmer each day.

Los Angeles Community College District Chancellor Donald Phelps said he’s heard horror stories from each of the district’s nine campuses, where students have waited for hours only to be told that all classes are full.

At Valley College, for example, 300 students tried to get into a biology course that had space for just 40, Phelps said. Valley has 115 classes on its summer schedule and more than 5,000 students already have applied for 2,400 openings.

On Thursday, the first day of registration, 1,500 students signed up, Stack said.

“It was an absolutely incredible day--a record,” Stack said. “This week, there will be a couple more days like that.”

Virtually all English, math, science and other core curriculum classes needed to meet general education requirements have long been filled up, even though summer classes at some campuses don’t begin until next week, said Jerome Bowens, a district fiscal analyst.

Waiting lists are also closed in many cases, said Bowens and administrators at the various schools.

Many of the schools cut off registration early, because the classes and waiting lists were full “and it just wasn’t fair to allow them to keep trying,” said Ina Geller, a spokeswoman for Mission College in Sylmar and Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

By the end of last week, there were more than 2,600 students seeking to enroll at Mission in classes that could accommodate only 1,600, Geller said. The result was lengthening waiting lists.

The lines of students trying to enter summer classes at the beginning of the registration period were somewhat shorter this week at Pierce. But that’s only because the school has spread the word that unless students already have secured classes, or their names are high on a waiting list, they may as well forget it, said William Norlund, vice president of academic affairs.

Summer classes at Pierce started Monday, nearly three weeks after the school stopped taking reservations for those trying to get classes. Even so, a line of several hundred hopeful students had formed by early morning, Norlund said, “but most of them realize there isn’t much there.”

At College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, one of the state’s fastest growing colleges, things aren’t any better.

“We started summer school two weeks ago and I don’t think we have a single class that wasn’t completely full,” college Supt. Dianne Van Hook said. “Most of them were full long before school ever started. We’re turning them away like crazy.”

Van Hook said most classes for the fall semester, which starts in late August, already are booked up as well.

Phelps said the situation is far worse than in past years, and that it will get even worse in the fall, given the state’s worsening budget problems and the likelihood of further spending cuts.

“I would say that once these classes fill up, there are not going to be the resources to add sections,” Phelps said. “That means classes that are full are full.”

Incoming freshmen are likely to be the ones who end up without classes because current students are often given first shot at enrolling. That means that many non-traditional students who had counted on the community college system--including those returning to school after years of work and immigrants new to the country--will be turned away, Phelps said.

The sheer numbers of students also will make it virtually impossible for community colleges to continue giving individualized instruction in vocational, nursing and other fields. “In effect,” Phelps said, “we’re shutting that off by the numbers of students we are putting in classes.”