Superintendent Audre Levy alerted the campus to the budget crisis at the board of trustees on the Garfield campus March 17.
What “we are looking at, of course, is the property tax short-fall. Many of you might realize that since property hasn’t been selling there’s a property tax short fall that is coming to the community colleges, so we had quite a discussion on it and voted that this would be a one-time hit for this particular year,” said Levy.
Levy suspects the short-fall would more likely be $1 million of the 100 million that will come from the school budget. In another report, “California produces the fewest amount of graduates who complete AA and AS degrees in the country and in the world,” said Levy.
The report that Levy read had compared California with other places in the country and gave praise to the state’s efforts, but at the same time said that efforts needed to be doubled.
“If we are meeting the needs of the students who come here, maybe they don’t need to graduate; maybe they just need certain courses and they take them, they complete them and move on,” said Armine Hacopian, president of the board.
Also, during the meeting, members of the speech and debate team approached the board to ask for funding.
“We’ve grown from a ragtag posse into one of the most feared voices in speech and debate not just in the greater Los Angeles area, not just in Southern California, but in the nation,” said Robert Cannon, speech and debate team president.
“In the past three years the speech team’s budget has shriveled smaller and smaller and we desperately need to be funded correctly. Other programs in the area are funded through their administration, such as: LA Valley, Santa Monica, LACC and Mount San Antonio College. All have strong funding directly through their administration, much like (a sports program would be), but ours, however, is not,” said Cannon.
Cannon went on to say that students on the team had turned down full scholarships to universities such as Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach, and Pepperdine, University of the Pacific, to name only a few, in order to maintain the friendships and stay with the coaching they have received at GCC. He also said students from four-year universities have left to become part of the squad here, a highly revered speech team on the circuit.
Josh Fleming, head coach of speech and debate and GCC speech communications instructor, spoke of new recruits for the team and their potential for being ambassadors for the college. He said “that three years ago, Glendale College did not even register on anyone’s radar on terms of speech and debate and now everyone knows about us, not only here in California, but around the United States.”
The board discussed the cost of sending students to competitions, but did not put to vote whetether or not they would support the speech and debate team due to inavailabilaty of the budget. The board should be getting the budget presentation in June said Levy.
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The board also recognized the work of Jane DiLucchio, division chair, Life Skills and noncredit business who started working with students in a small bungalow and now has many students that say they owe their success to her.
During the meeting some GED graduates shared their stories with the audience at the Garfield Campus.
Jan Young was also recognized as a full-time faculty member in the developmental skills lab. Young stepped up from the audience to point out the mortar boards that represent the some of the 95 graduates of the GED program from nine years past, including boards from some of the graduates of the adult program.
“Currently from the shoe box that Jane started in, we now have over 1,100 students that come through our lab, we have 600 concurrent students. Those are high school students that are in high school today and what they are doing is they are repeating the courses.
“Students come from all over,” Young said. “Not just Glendale and Hoover, but they come from Pasadena and Burbank to take course work here and finish their course work here.
Also offered at the Garfield campus, is the high school diploma that is offered through Glendale College. Glendale has about 600 GED students per year that are in a prep program. Young said that these students are struggling to read and they’re working their way up to getting the equivalent of a high school diploma.
The next Board of Trustees Meeting will be April 21 in Kreider Hall at 5 p.m.
