Long Beach City College
Weathering ‘The Perfect Storm’

By Tiffany Rider
Staff Writer

Long Beach City College (LBCC) is not unlike other public higher education institutions in California.

LBCC has been hit with budgetary problems, resulting in a cap on enrollment at a time when students are desperate to get in and stay in school. The college has seen an increasing number of applicants, but the school cannot accommodate beyond its means.

To offset these financial issues, LBCC has cut 12 percent of its core sections this academic year, with a focus on preserving English, science, mathematics and speech courses.

“We’re working hard to shift resources to those areas and keep those sections as open as possible so that students can get the classes that they need to move on to whatever they need to move on to,” says LBCC President-Superintendent Eloy Ortiz Oakley.

Oakley says these core classes are the most important for students earning a certificate, associate’s degree or transfer status. For example, the 12 percent reduction cuts English I from 180 sections to 140 sections. And instead of offering five sections for Introduction to Art, LBCC offers two.

The college is also considering cuts to areas outside of the classroom, including employee salaries and benefits. The school already reduced its utility costs by closing the campus one day a week last summer. The campus will repeat the effort this year.

“We’re trying as best we can to evenly disburse it while maintaining as much of those resources and those core classes as possible,” Oakley says.

He also hopes to preserve nursing and other vocational programs. Other areas LBCC is cutting into are non-credit courses, which include lower-level English as a Second Language classes, courses that don’t directly lead to transfer-level courses and physical education courses.

The college has not eliminated any programs – it’s only scaling back the number of sections. But LBCC, like other public colleges and universities in the state, now has a higher demand for enrollment, which creates more competition for those classes.

Oakley says LBCC will also reduce class sizes, an action that comes after the college increased class size by 10 percent last year. LBCC must shrink classes because the college exceeds an enrollment-funding cap imposed by the state.

“Unfortunately, that’s going to continue to impact students because, again, more students are coming and we’re not able to meet the demand,” Oakley says.

He says students aren’t very happy about that.

“You’ve got many students that were turned away from the CSU, just trying to get a class here,” Oakley says. “They’re getting turned away from other community colleges, from the UC system; you’ve got folks that are unemployed trying to get in to school. It’s sort of like the perfect storm.”

The tough times have also reached LBCC staff members, who Oakley says are not immune to what’s going on in the economy.

Oakley says the college has been working with staff to prepare them for cuts. The budget situation is hardest on part-time faculty, who are desperate for classes after full-time faculty fill their course loads. Temporary employees have lost their jobs. Oakley says permanent employees are watching the cuts, knowing that they’re next on the chopping block. The college is working with both the faculty bargaining unit and the classified bargaining unit for assistance with those reductions.

“Those will be difficult discussions,” Oakley says. “It’s never easy to ask employees to either change their benefits or reduce their salary.”

LBCC has worked diligently to inform its students about the college’s budget constraints and the future of their education, according to Oakley. He encourages students from the Long Beach Unified School District to enroll right after graduating from high school, and LBCC offers those local students early registration.

“We try to encourage them to take advantage of that, because the sooner they can get enrolled, the better off they’ll be,” he says. “It’s a continuous education process.”

Oakley says students, who realize the situation now after enduring the last two semesters, have become very competitive over enrollment.

Mark Taylor, director of community and governmental relations, says the campus’s Student Services and Admissions and Records offices helped reach out to students through e-mails and nearly 20,000 phone messages about how the state budget cuts are affecting the college.

“There are a lot of different ways we try to communicate with our students to help them know what’s going on,” Taylor says. “This semester they changed the financial aid disbursement. That was another big issue that we had to deal with. We used a very similar way to try and get all of that out. Whatever means we have, we try to help our students navigate this.”

Last year LBCC received a warning from the Accreditation Commission of Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) regarding the lack of a uniform system to measure levels of student learning. ACCJC requested that the college implement a data collection and inquiry system for all departments. This system would go beyond the measurement of grades and individual department assessments to meet the requirements for accreditation.

“Historically, the faculty had a lot of freedom in their classrooms,” Oakley says. “They have done this in different ways in different departments. The commission wants it done in a systematic way.”

Oakley says there was initial resistance but that LBCC has made tremendous progress over the last year. The college recently hosted a team from the commission and has since sent a recommendation to the full commission. ACCJC met the first week in January, and Oakley says he expects to hear from the commission this month.

“At this point, I feel confident that the warning status will be lifted,” he says.

The budgetary issues and accreditation warning, Oakley says, have forced the college to take a good look at they way it functions, does business and serves students. LBCC can’t grow enrollments, so the goal now is to find better ways of ensuring that current students are successful.

“There are a lot of programs in place, like our Student Success Initiative and the Student Success Centers that will ultimately lead to more students completing their educational goals,” Oakley says. “That will be the silver lining. In the end, we will have taken this opportunity to really look at how we can make our students successful.”

Construction Projects At The Campus

LBCC is currently in the second portion of the Measure E bond program, passed in 2004. Measure E passed again in 2006, authorizing the college another $40 million to be used for implementing infrastructure elements of the 2020 Master Plan. Current construction projects are a new technology building at the Pacific Coast Campus, which will open in two months, and a new bookstore and one-stop student center at the Liberal Arts Campus. A new parking structure, also on the Liberal Arts Campus, will break ground in the next two months.

The master plan’s largest project involves renovating the main classroom building at the Pacific Coast Campus, which Oakley says the college will begin later this year. The building houses 80 percent of the classrooms at the campus. Oakley says the facility will be completely gutted and renovated over the next three years.

“It’s a long project, and we’re doing it in two phases,” Oakley says. “It will completely change the face of the Pacific Coast Campus. We’re really excited about that.”

Oakley says with all of the projects going on, LBCC will be building over the next 10 to 13 years.