Community Commentary:

We all know what the community colleges provide. For many high school seniors, veterans, displaced workers and more, the community college system has been a “starting or restarting point.”

Our community colleges are funded primarily with state tax dollars. Because of this year’s financial crisis, these institutions are facing severe budget problems.

The budget crisis has forced districts to reduce scores of classes, to lay off or furlough staff and, in some cases, to shut down for the summer. Students see fewer educational options, delay their plans and, sometimes, forgo school. This catastrophic situation is unlikely to change for some time.

But, recent startling developments from Sacramento will put even more pressure on the community college system. And these educational budget reductions are impacting people and kids you know.

In addition to reducing the budget for community colleges, the state of California has taken the drastic step to permanently reduce the number of students that college districts can serve. This “Full Time Equivalent Students,” or “FTES,” represents a full-time student taking 15 units for both semesters, totaling 30 units in an academic year.

For the Coast Community College District, the state’s workload reduction amounts to a reduction of 1,260 credit FTES for 2009-10 and 1,510 unfunded FTES already served in 2008-09, totaling 2,770 credit FTES needed to be reduced in 2009-10. This represents 27,700 classroom seats that must be reduced in 2009-10 in order to live within the provided budget.

While this workload reduction will be spread throughout our three colleges, it effectively amounts to eliminating 8% of full-time enrollment at all our colleges.

These cuts are severe and devastating to our students, community, faculty and staff. I strongly encourage our residents to contact their local legislators and share concerns about how these punitive and permanent apportionment reductions from Sacramento will limit the opportunities of our students to achieve their goals, will hurt our economy by reducing our ability to educate and train qualified workers, and will hurt our faculty and staff, who devote their professional endeavors to serve our students.

The more people we can inform about the drastic nature of these cuts and their impacts to students and the community, the better case we can make for helping to restore some of the funding that the state is proposing to take away for the long term.

The California State University system has slammed the door on many prospective students, many of whom are now turning to community colleges to help meet their educational goals. We cannot turn people away, but we have now become even more restricted in the number of students we can serve.

It is up to all of us to contact the elected officials in Sacramento to let them know of the individual impacts their actions have caused.

JIM MORENO is the board president of the Coast Community College District.