Second in a series
Re “Thank You, Prop. 30, Says Abu-Ghazaleh of West Los Angeles College”
[img]1816|left|Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh||no_popup[/img]While he is grateful that the passage of Prop. 30 channeled fresh, badly needed, funding into the coffers of West Los Angeles College, Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh said the replenishment just maintained the already downsized programming. It did not enrich the school.
“All community colleges in California have to be lean,” the President said, “and we were pretty lean already. “For a college to be financially stable, it means that on a good day, you have to be very lean.
“On a bad day, in pre-Prop. 30 times, it would have meant that we would have gone into an unsustainable mode, reducing classes and cutting the kinds of services that just keep a place going.”
Question: Since November, numerous politicians have been complaining that apportionment of Prop. 30 revenue was lopsidedly unfair. Yet you and the School District both are pleased with the new funding? Why the gap between the two sides?
“It is very important to understand what we expected from Prop. 30,” Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh said. “We did not expect it to be a panacea that returned us to the halcyon days of a class for everybody who wanted to study anything.
“Thirty just really stopped the decline. It did not restore anything.
“At West L.A. College, we were able to do exactly what we thought we would be able to do if Prop. 30 passed.
“This meant we would have some classes in the spring. About 35 sections were added.
“We also built an entire summer school that we had not offered in many years. It now has grown to something on the order of 150 class sections.
“Before, we quite literally had a handful of summer classes. Most would have been either grant-funded or would have been regulatory requirements, such as health-and- safety training for students taking health services courses in the fall who would have to have prior training before they could take home classes.”
It sounds as if you have done more than stanch the bleeding.
“We had cut a lot of sections out of the ’12-’13 academic schedule, in anticipation of Prop. 30 not passing,” Mr. Abu-Ghazaleh said. “Whatever sections we had cut, we now were able to add them back in. But because Prop. 30 passed, we did not feel it would be the best service to add all of those sections back into spring immediately.”
(To be continued)
