COD spokesman Tom Wixon told The Desert Sun, “I’ve never seen anything like this—it’s a tsunami. These are all programs designed to help people negotiate the college process who otherwise would be intimidated. Community colleges are all about a second chance. They always have been.”
So far the school has frozen hiring, purchasing of new equipment and non-essential travel. However, the enrollment at the school has increased. Like many community colleges, the College of the Desert saw a 15 percent increase in summer enrollment compared to last year, and is expected to see a 17 percent increase.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is expected to cut $131 million more this year and up to $273 million next year. The district has already cut $560 million from this year’s budget and is proposing to lay off up to 2,500 teachers. The district may also have to get rid of summer school, after-school programs, and switch some employees to a 10-month work year.
The news of summer school being cancelled has been one of the most tangible expressions of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s budget cuts. At least 225,000 students enroll in summer school in LAUSD, the state’s largest school district.
The severity of the cuts in the offing have provoked outrage among educators, students, and parents. In Los Angeles, a group of nine teachers and two community activists have started a hunger strike to protest LAUSD’s plans to lay off 2,250 teachers and increase classroom sizes.
In UC Santa Cruz, 100 students and staff gathered for a demonstration May 27 to protest the $13 million in budget cuts. The students organized under a group called “Students of Color Collective” held a banner at a rally that read “Welcome to the University of Institutionalized Colonialization.” The students feared that Latinos, Black, and other minority students would be unable to afford access to the school after a 10 percent increase in tuition that was approved by the UC Board of Regents recently.
However, although the budget cuts would no doubt deny many historically-oppressed minority groups from attending college and receiving vital social services, the working class as a whole, regardless of skin color, will bear the brunt of these massive cuts to the state infrastructure.
High School students in Los Angeles had a walk-out on May 22 to protest LAUSD’s plans to lay off thousands of teachers. At one school, students threatened to boycott the state testing that determines a school’s ability to earn allocated money for high-performing schools. The largest demonstration saw 450 students march three miles from the Santee Education Complex, where more than 30 teachers will lose their jobs, to the LAUSD’s headquarters in downtown LA. School police arrested two students after the High School contingent occupied the District’s outside smoker’s patio.
Many student organizers were afraid to give their names to the media fearing retribution from their school administrators. At a Monday rally in Santee, police ticketed three students for “disorderly conduct.” Ron Gochez, who teaches World History at Santee, told the Los Angeles Times, “It’s a very interesting sentiment on campus. Teachers are almost depending on the students because it’s the last opportunity to do something.”
On Monday, parents and teachers drove to the State Capitol to tell legislators of the State Assembly and Senate budget committee in Sacramento how the cuts will affect them and their children. One parent, Laura Kieffer of Pasadena, told legislators, “We’ve lost music, drama, art and dance teachers. We’ve lost our middle school orchestra. We’ve lost our 5th grade band. We’ve eliminated our computer instructional assistant. We’ve lost all of our librarians.”
Pixie Hayward Schickele, a second-grade teacher of English-language learners from Richmond, told legislators, “We cannot take more cuts. We are already bleeding to death.” She added, “Add to that, our district is now proposing taking away our health coverage for our families, retroactively to January 1st. Who’ll come to teach the children?”
One of the testimonies from the speakers mentioned how a $300 million cut to bus transportation would leave many children stranded without the means to get to school from home. Rebecca Scheel, a bus driver for more than 12 years told the committee, “My students live in rural Gilroy, many miles from school, across the 101 Freeway, without a safe route to walk or even ride their bikes. Many parents work in the fields and are not available to take them in the morning to school. There is no public transportation...Our kids desperately need the school bus to get to school safely.”
Despite hours of such testimony, Democrat and Republican lawmakers were not moved. In fact, one Assemblywoman’s remarks, Noreen Davis, a Democrat from Santa Rosa, gave crocodile tears to the teachers while expressing the real attitude of the political establishment to the education crisis. “I feel their pain. I share their pain. I share all their concerns. The challenge is, how do we balance the collapse of the world economy with continuing to educate our children?”
Within the framework of the capitalist system, this “balance” means the impoverishment of the American working calsss and the dismantling of public education. The war that is being waged against public education and what little remains of the state infrastructure in California is one of the most glaring example of the failure of capitalism.
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