Campus in Search of $63 Million : Education: Mission College, ending its days of operating out of storefronts, needs state funds to provide for its projected enrollment growth.

Mission College is finally moving to its $20-million permanent home in Sylmar this summer after years of frustrating setbacks and delays.

But officials say the college is likely to soon outgrow its new campus unless an additional $63.7 million in state money to accommodate growing enrollment is received.

The 6,000-student college--which for 16 years has held classes in rented storefronts, high schools and hospital auditoriums--will ask the state for about $55 million over the next five years to pay for more buildings, including classrooms and a library, under a newly completed master plan.

The additions are needed to accommodate increasing enrollment, which will more than double to about 13,000 by the year 2000, according to the master plan.

“Our enrollment’s going to skyrocket when we have a campus,” said Charles Dirks, president of the college’s Academic Senate and faculty chairman of the campus development committee. “People will begin to identify with Mission now that it has a campus.”

Mission also needs $8.7 million from the state to pay for instructional materials and to hire instructors and staff for the expansion, said Jack Fujimoto, Mission’s acting president.

The master plan calls for the college to expand its programs each year so that by 1995, Mission will offer residents of the northeastern San Fernando Valley a variety of courses, as well as services such as counseling and job placement, Fujimoto said.

“Having a complete college will allow us to compete successfully with fully developed campuses such as Santa Clarita, Valley and Pierce colleges,” Fujimoto told a recent meeting of the college’s community advisory council.

However, none of the millions of dollars called for in the Mission College plan are in the state’s budget. And in a year in which Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed large cuts in education funding, college officials said it may be years before Mission receives any state money for the proposed improvements.

The school’s master plan will be presented to the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees for approval later this month. Then it must be sent to the state Department of Education for approval.

Fujimoto said the plan, which was more than a year in the making, “is a document constructed to meet the ever-changing needs of a growing population, its faculty and student body.”

Growth is paramount in the minds of Mission administrators as they prepare to begin moving June 30 from rented buildings scattered along San Fernando Road in San Fernando to the permanent campus on 22.5 acres at Hubbard Street and Eldridge Avenue.

To accommodate the anticipated enrollment increase, Mission administrators are negotiating to buy 17 acres of land nearby to complete the campus.

In addition to the three red-tile roof buildings nearing completion on the new campus, the master plan calls for construction of a library, physical education facilities, a student services center, fine arts complex, child-care facility and more classrooms.

“When we made our master plan, we didn’t reach for the sky. We just asked for what we believe is necessary,” said Joel Recinos, an administrative analyst who coordinated the plan’s development.

The master plan calls for expanding course offerings in vocational and industrial education, as well as fine arts. It also provides for the addition of intercollegiate sports, including softball, soccer, baseball, golf and cross-country running.

“We might still lack a few things like a football field or a swimming pool, but those will come in time,” Recinos said.

Still, the new master plan is “pretty comprehensive,” he said.

“This is to tell everybody this is the money we need,” Recinos said.

Had voters approved Proposition C, the $200-million bond measure for capital improvements in the nine-campus community college district on April 9, Mission would have received at least $20 million of badly needed funds.

But $20 million, Fujimoto said, would “probably only get us halfway through.”

“All of us are in a pinch,” Recinos said of the state’s public colleges and universities.

Dirks, who also worked on Mission’s master plan, said the increasing Latino population in surrounding communities gives the college the opportunity to serve “the state’s fastest-growing minority.”

“Currently, the average worker is a white male,” he said. “In the near future, four out of five workers will be Asian or Hispanic.”

In addition to being the fastest-growing area in Los Angeles, Sylmar has the greatest need for post-secondary education, according to the master plan.

Of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 49 high schools, Sylmar High, the farthest geographically from a permanent college campus, has the fewest seniors going to college, Dirks said.

Nearby San Fernando High School, with a 56% dropout rate, ranks 46th, Dirks said.

“In the fall of 1991, these students will, for the first time, have a dignified permanent campus to attract them . . . ,” the master plan noted.

State officials have consistently underestimated Mission’s potential, Dirks said. “Without a campus, they thought we’d only get 3,500 students. We have twice that,” he said.

“Unless we are allowed to expand,” Mission administrators concluded in the plan, “potential students will be denied entry to the college and the objectives we have established will be seriously undermined.”