Windfall to Let Colleges Restore Some Classes : Education: The $5 million comes from reserves and spending cuts. It will help the Valley’s schools reverse enrollment declines.

An unexpected infusion of $5 million into the final Los Angeles Community College District budget will help the Valley’s three junior colleges reverse enrollment losses caused by tuition hikes and cuts of fall class schedules, officials said.

The money, coming partly from district reserves and partly from cuts in district office expenses, was added to the $378.1-million budget for the 1993-94 school year, adopted last week by the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees.

The trustees earmarked the funds exclusively to restore class offerings, intending that the fall schedule cuts could be restored in the spring, said district spokesman Fausto Capobianco.

“We expect to exceed the level of classes offered last spring,” Capobianco said. “We won’t have fewer classes.”

Though heartened by the windfall, officials at the three Valley campuses remained more guarded about its effects.

“This now means that we are fairly close to what we were last year,” said Shannon Stack, spokeswoman for Valley College in Van Nuys. “We’re going to very carefully add classes where students need classes.”

Class schedules at the three campuses were decimated this fall after the tentative district budget, adopted by the trustees in June, cut 9.9% from operations at the district’s nine campuses. Pierce College cut its fall schedule 10%, Valley 12.5% and Mission nearly 15%, officials of the schools said.

Consequently, thousands of students were turned away when the classes they wanted filled up.

By the sixth day of classes, enrollment was 5,868 at Mission, down 1,451 from the previous year, 16,037 at Pierce, down 2,753, and 16,478 at Valley, down 2,128. The combined district enrollment shrank 11%, from 114,012 to 101,640.

The Valley’s other two community colleges, both single-college districts, weathered the state budget crisis more easily.

At Glendale College, enrollment after the second week of classes was 13,865, 5.1% lower than last year’s 14,613. Administrators attribute the difference largely to the increase in tuition.

College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita offered the same number of classes as last fall and was one of two colleges in the state to experience a slight increase in full-time-equivalency students--a measure of the total number of units being taken, said college spokeswoman Sue Bozman. Although total enrollment of 6,225 was down 1.9% from last fall, there was a substantial increase in the number of students taking a full course load.

The enrollment decline at Mission, Pierce and Valley could pose a serious threat to the district’s finances because of lost tuition and the potential loss of state funding based on enrollment. Continued loss of students could cause a snowball effect, further undermining the already reduced classroom budget.

Although the district has not yet formally apportioned the money to the nine campuses, administrators at the three Valley schools began meeting this week to plan how to reconstruct their class schedules.

Based on the complex formula used by the district to fund individual campuses, Valley administrators anticipate receiving a share of approximately $763,000, Stack said.

Stack said some of the money will be used to replace two of the 17 full-time teaching positions the college lost last year and the rest will pay for part-time teachers on an hourly basis.

In addition to restoring spring classes, Valley administrators also may put some of the money into the summer session schedule, Stack said. Consideration is also being given to starting some short-term fall classes in high-demand basic subjects such as math and English as a second language.

At Mission, the hardest hit of the Valley’s three colleges, President Jack Fujimoto said the academic affairs staff is working with the faculty department heads to decide which classes will be restored. Mission, the smallest of the three campuses, lost nearly 20% of its enrollment compared to the fall of 1992.

Fujimoto estimated the college will receive about $250,000.

“Mission’s share is much smaller than Pierce or Valley, but still, every bit helps,” he said. “We plan to put that into spring instruction.”

Pierce College, which had another windfall this year from a $1-million deal with a commercial developer to dump earth from an excavation on the Woodland Hills campus, expects to receive $796,000 more from the district, President Lowell Erickson said.

Erickson said half the new money will be applied to the fall budget for part-time instructors, which was running $500,000 in the red even after the 10% reduction of the class schedule. The rest will be put into the spring semester, he said.

Despite the reprieve, college officials are reluctant to predict full recovery of the lost enrollment even after classes are restored next spring. They also blame tuition increases for keeping some students away. Particularly, they point to the district’s new $50-per-unit tuition for students who have bachelor’s or graduate degrees.

“This college always had a couple thousand baccalaureate students,” Stack said. “Those students are disappearing. You can go to UCLA Extension cheaper than you can go here.”