SACRAMENTO (MNG) ? Two bus loads of Mendocino College students joined thousands of others on Monday, rallying in Sacramento to protest slashed budgets and rising fees at California”s community colleges.
Arriving in Sacramento in time for a march over the Sacramento River on the tower bridge, students demanded more funds for public education.
Lisa Lunde, Mendocino College”s public information and marketing assistant, described the crowd as mellow with a level of intensity that increased as protesters crossed the bridge and entered the Capitol city.
Community colleges now charge $26 per unit and some protesters, Lunde said, carried signs denouncing a proposed increase of an additional $14 per unit. At Mendocino College, Meridith Randall says that inevitably such a proposal would be a burden for a lot of students, who are already taking longer to finish what should be a two-year program because of cuts the college had to make to section offerings. She said that for students who would normally take two years to finish, she”s expecting them to take two-and-a-half years to be done.
“The state essentially told us at the beginning of this fiscal year that even though we had a certain number of students, we would get less money … We do get paid per student but they put a limit. We have 3,100 full time equivalent students this spring but they said we”d only get paid for 2,900 next year. They cut our limit by about 200 students. This puts colleges at a difficult position.” So the college is prioritizing, offering more core courses and eliminating recreation classes. The college has already planned summer and fall schedules, cutting about 10 percent of what it had this past year, which saw a 5 percent decrease in class offerings. Or, in other words, about 50 to 75 course sections have been eliminated, Randall explained.
The students who need the most support are the ones being affected the most severely from budget cuts, Randall said.
The college also experienced cuts for disabled students and counseling programs, resulting in about half of the money that they used to receive from the state. “That does cost a lot of trouble for students who really need it. Why the state did that, I don”t know.” In addition, Mendocino College received half the funds for its Extended Opportunity Programs and Services program, a state funded counseling and special services program designed to assist low income at risk students.
Asked if there”s a light at the end of the tunnel to all of this, Randall said, “We”re the only college in this town. We have an obligation to offer as much as we can. We expect next year to be bad too, but after that it should be OK. We”re hanging on and waiting for things to get better.”
