Dan Troy, California Vice Chancellor for Finance.  (Source:  Community College Chancellor's website).

Dan Troy

Celebrate might be too strong a word, but, in the current fiscal context, community colleges have reason to at least raise a small glass as they head into summer.

The budget bill passed Friday by the Legislature brings the budget for the 112 community colleges up to $6 billion for the 2013-14 fiscal year. That’s up by more than $200 million over this year, and begins the process of restoring the $809 million hit community college have taken during the past three years.

The two big-ticket items include funding to start bringing back students and a cost-of-living increase. The budget provides an additional $89.4 million to rebuild enrollment. That will fund about 40,000 additional students; however, it still accounts for less than 10 percent of the 470,000 students community college officials said the system lost during the bad years.

There’s also $87.5 million COLA increase, about 1.57 percent, the first since 2007, said Dan Troy, Vice Chancellor for Finance at the statewide community college office. How the COLA is distributed is up to each community college district. While some of it will go into salary negotiations for professors and staff, it will also help cover the rising costs of everything from the electric bill to supplies.

Other budget increases include:

  • $50 million to implement the Student Success Act of 2012, which includes counseling and advising services, orientation for every student, and helping each student design an education plan with a path to a degree or certificate or to transfer to a four-year college.
  •  $47 million to implement Proposition 39, the November ballot initiative that creates a fund for energy efficient projects. Instead of allocating that money based on the number of students in each community college district, the budget bill lets the Chancellor’s office decide which projects to fund. Troy said they’ll probably do that through a grant program and classes to train the workers who will be needed to work on those construction projects.
  • $30 million toward the $1 billion needed for deferred maintenance on the campuses, plus new books, lab equipment and technology to modernize classrooms.

 

“Information technology improves exponentially every year,” Troy said, “and as much as colleges are trying to keep up with those changes, it can be hard when you don’t have specific line items in the budget to do that.”

One budget item that declined between Gov. Brown’s May revise and the trailer bill is the amount put into paying down deferrals, the money borrowed from future years’ community college budgets to help cover deficits during the recession. Brown proposed paying off $64 million in 2013-14, but the Legislature reduced it to $30 million.  But the  rationale is a good one, Troy said.  Lawmakers are putting the rest of the money into student services for disabled, low-income and at-risk students; those services had been seriously diminished in recent years. Before Proposition 30, which raises temporary taxes to pay for education, the community college college deferral was $961 million; the deferral will fall to just under $600 million next year.

Overall, Troy said community college officials are pleased with the budget, which raised the per-student apportionment to $4,637, up from $4,565.  Despite the increase, funding hasn’t been keeping pace with needs, Troy said.

“I think I can say we’ve been going in the wrong direction in recent years, and not only have we not kept pace with the cost of inflation, we’ve gone backwards,” Troy said.

The new budget, he said, not only boosts the number of students community colleges can educate, but also helps restore the quality of that education.

The budget now awaits Gov. Jerry Brown’s approval. 

To get more reports like this one, click here to sign up for EdSource’s no-cost daily email on latest developments in education.

Share Article

Comments

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * *

Comments Policy

We welcome your comments. All comments are moderated for civility, relevance and other considerations. Click here for EdSource's Comments Policy.