Proposed Cut of UCI Education Department Protested : Academia: About 275 educators complain in letters to chancellor. She will study the comments and says she won’t make a decision until the end of the academic year.

More than 275 county educators have complained to Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening’s office over the proposed elimination of UCI’s Department of Education, said campus spokeswoman Karen Young.

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The letters protesting the proposed dismantling of the department are being forwarded to a 20-member academic planning committee made up of faculty members, administrators, staff and students who will summarize them for a report being prepared for Wilkening, Young said.

Wilkening had said she would accept comments from the public on the issue until Friday, and Young said she will not comment on or make a decision about the department until the end of the academic year.

Searching for ways to deal with an expected budget shortfall totaling millions of dollars a year in the near future, an academic planning task force in February recommended “disestablishing” several departments, and streamlining others.

Comments about the proposed closure came from superintendents, administrators and teachers in various school districts throughout Orange County, saying the department provides a vital link to its neighboring communities and a supply of high-quality teachers.

Judith Magsaysay, principal of Pio Pico Elementary in Santa Ana, said she told Wilkening in a letter that the UCI student teachers who have been working with her school for three years provided “great role models for the kids.

“What we’re getting (from UCI’s Education Department) is teachers better prepared for real classroom experience,” she added.

Young said the academic task force’s recommendations to cut several departments and streamline others have caused “tremendous” discussion and debate on campus. “Much of the debate has been about the Department of Education,” she said.

Ralph Cicerone, chair of the task force, was unavailable for comment.

If the department were eliminated, “the impact would be devastating,” said Carol Booth Olson, head of the writing project for teachers. “We would be shutting down the primary training site for teachers in Orange County. . . . It severs an important link between UCI and the community that can’t be reconstructed.”

The department gets about half of its $1.4-million budget from grants, and the other half comes from UCI.

In a report responding to the committee’s recommendation, the department, which consists of 17 full-time professors and 12 visiting or part-time faculty, said its credential program has trained more than 2,000 teachers in 10 years, most of whom ended up in Orange County schools. About 140 students are currently in the program.

The committee recommended moving the credential program to the California State University system, or to UCI’s extension program.

Transferring the credential program to the Cal State system is not possible because it has no room, according to a letter from Carol Barnes, chair of elementary and bilingual education at Cal State Fullerton, and the report stated that the UCI Extension program does not have the capacity for a credential program.

The department would be willing to consider becoming part of one of the other departments such as Physical Sciences or Social Sciences, according to the report.