First in a series
[img]1816|left|Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh||no_popup[/img]Although Gov. Brown has been spun dizzy by critics since Prop. 30 passed last November for his asserted failure to apportion the promised proportion of billions for education, Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh says the measure rescued West Los Angeles College from the brink.
For West, 30 has fulfilled the drum-banging buildup to Election Day.
“Prop. 30 really was clearly defined,” said the president, who is closing out his second year. “Its goal was to stop the bleeding. What it did was to allow us to stop the cutting.”
In the middle of the fall semester, Prop. 30 passed, decisively, and a relieved West L.A. was able to kill trims that had been scheduled for the spring.
“It didn’t help us recover any of the cuts we had been making over the previous years,” Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh said. “But it stopped us at a point that, hopefully, is the bottom of our slide. Prop. 30 made sure that precipitous cuts we had planned for this academic year did not have to be implemented.
“When we built our budget, it was around dramatic additional cuts, 7 and 8 percent of our budget.
“When you consider we already are spending well over 95 percent of our budget on base salaries,” where, asked the president, “do you get 7 percent?
“Not just from cutting supplies to a class or a little bit of advertising, or non-essentials.”
The college, Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh pointed out, could not have unilaterally shrunk salaries anyway. Those would have to have been agreed to by various collective bargaining units.
“That would have taken us down a path that really would have been precipitous,” he said. “It would have been in the Human Resources area, and meant cutting dramatic services and more of our offerings to students.”
Counseling, placement tests and Admissions were near the top of the list of vulnerables, along with reduced hours for the campus maintenance staff.
“Everything,” Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh said.
(To be continued)
