Mailbag:

Increasing student fees at California community colleges will accomplish little. For years, school administrators and their elected boards of trustees have been trying to devise ways to attract additional money. Most of their schemes have been ill-advised and/or shortsighted.

Funding for our community college system is mostly based upon enrollment numbers — the higher the enrollment, the more the funding. When enrollment numbers dipped in the past, the shortfall was eased by eliminating the two most essential aspects of the entire system: teachers and classes. During economic downturns, some community colleges actually increased administrative staff while teacher and class offerings were being downsized!

Every non-teaching person hired by a school is paid with tax dollars earmarked for education, so decisions need to be made about prioritizing non-teaching personnel. Classroom support people (audio-visual, computer techs, reprographics, for example) are vital, as are maintenance personnel and campus security. These positions must also be kept.

Everything else is expendable, all the way up to, but not necessarily including, the top three administrators (college president, finance dean, and dean of instruction, and their secretaries). No longer will the system be able to support a huge battery of administrative assistants and their staffs. Administrators, for example, have salaries often twice that of a tenured teacher, and four or five times that of a part-time teacher! The first cuts needed to be made are administrative — certainly before a teacher is laid off.

However, in the “real” world of education that’s not the way it happens. Any school administrator will eagerly tell you how important the student is, and how all decisions are made keeping in mind how those decisions will affect students. Noble indeed. But when times are tough it’s the administrators who have the job of cutting costs. Does anyone suppose for even a moment, that a community college administrator will ax his/her own position in order to bring costs under control? Nor will they willingly cut into their own staff, which would merely increase their own workload. Instead, they lay off part-time teachers, not protected by tenure, and by doing that, automatically discontinue offering the classes taught by those teachers.

The effect on the student can be serious.

First, part-time professors are among the best teachers in community college systems, many having their own businesses and offering specific industry knowledge often unavailable to full-time, tenured faculty.

Second, some of those discontinued class offerings are often needed by the student in order to satisfy transfer requirements to a four-year college or university. Student needs come first? Indeed!

It’s long past time that we recognized that a school administrator is nowhere near as valuable to the public as a teacher — and started pressuring college trustees to start their payroll cutting at that level — leaving teachers in place to educate our kids.

Alan Remington

Costa Mesa

Editor’s Note: Alan Remington is a music professor at OCC.