LAKEPORT >> As Lake County makes its way through the third week of the Mendocino Complex fires, local community colleges are working nonstop to orchestrate a successful restart, post-evacuation.
“Students, faculty—everybody was evacuated,” said Eileen Lucas, Center Assistant at the Lake Center of Mendocino College, with evident concern. “When that wall of fire came down the hill,” she said, “it was time to go.” Behind the LCMC campus are the hills of the South Cow Mountain Recreation Area, where the Mendocino Complex’s River Fire had brought its eastern march dangerously close to the school and nearby structures as soon as July 28.
For two full weeks following the ensuing evacuation orders, everybody involved with the LCMC—from students going into the finals week of their summer math classes to Judith Kanavle, Interim Director at the LCMC—was thrown into uncertainty. Kanavle said she had been worried about her own home, which is located to the west of Highway 29 in Lakeport, not to mention the school itself. She said she first “knew it was serious” on July 29 when a friend of her husband’s, who is a Cal Fire firefighter, called Kanavle and asked for her home address to check whether it had burned, saying “this fire is thumping.” Luckily, Kanavle’s house did not burn.
Though the start dates of a few classes have been pushed back by one week, the LCMC’s opening has not been delayed, and all registration and student services have been made available on-schedule. In fact, Kanavle said that in some areas of the registration process, staff support has been increased by two or three times the normal amount, to speed things up for students who were unable to register during the evacuations.
Mendocino College is funded largely by the State of California, which provides money dependent on the number of credit hours being taken by all the students at one campus for a given year. This means that with too few students signed up, the LCMC would have to begin cancelling courses. “Our threshold is about 10—15 students per class, and that is based on us being able to pay the instructor and break even for the class,” Kanavle said. She noted that as of Wednesday August 15, student enrollment was down 30 percent from that same day last year.
Classes in the Health and Child Development curricula were the most empty, and Kanavle stressed that with every class that is cancelled due to lack of enrollment, students are more at-risk for not being able to graduate on time. With the extra staff on board to speed up registration, the LCMC is putting a call out for more students to sign up for more classes. “We want to offer as many classes as possible,” Kanavle said, “but we can’t lose money on the classes we’re offering.”
Kanavle said that there is still time for students to begin their registration, and that some late-start classes don’t begin until September 4 and even later. Mendocino College is offering a variety of services for students affected by the fires, including textbooks and school supplies, a free food pantry for any current student, food vouchers and emergency funds for students with addresses in impacted neighborhoods, and counseling. The LCMC will is offering increased registration hours as well as counseling, financial aid services, and placement testing until August 24. More information regarding these services can be obtained by calling the LCMC at (707) 263-4944.
