From the desk of Melissa Fox, candidate for 70th Assembly District:
Class Closed:
Misplaced Budget Priorities Cause Community College Crisis
Students now starting classes at our community colleges face extraordinary challenges as they attempt to get the education and training they need and our state was once committed to provide.
Due to $520 million in budget cuts, our community colleges have eliminated 10 percent of their classes and the rest are over-enrolled. Students are facing long waiting lists, rising costs, and drastically reduced aid.
According to California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, “For the first time, our first time enrollments dropped. It wasn’t a lack of demand, it was a lack of supply. People are being denied.”
These devastating cuts to California’s community colleges have come at exactly the wrong time – when unemployment is high, veterans are returning home from deployment, and more people are seeking the educational opportunities and workforce training necessary for success in the 21st century.
These cuts are not simply the unavoidable result of our economic downtown. Instead, they are the result of Sacramento’s gridlock and misguided budget priorities, which have failed to recognize the needs of middle class Californians.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
California should not be spending more on prisoners than on the students in our community colleges. We should not be spending more on tax breaks for multinational corporations that ship our jobs overseas than the students in our own communities. And like every other oil producing state, California should have a reasonable oil extraction fee that would raise $1 billion for our public universities and community colleges. – [perfect! – Vern]
My opponent says that our schools, colleges and universities don’t need more funding. That’s nonsense.
Our community colleges are crucial gateways to success and prosperity for millions of Californians. More than any other institution, our community colleges provide the educational opportunities and training necessary for millions of working and middle class Californians, including adults and returning veterans, to achieve the California Dream. In fact, three-quarters of California’s more than 20,000 Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans who are attending college are enrolled in a community college.
Our community college students and their families need real representation in Sacramento.
I pledge to provide that representation – and fight to make sure that our community college students have the education and training programs they need to succeed.
Melissa
September 7, 2010
Melissa Fox speaks the truth folks. Let’s not kid ourselves; we have dropped to 49th in per capita spending on education and cannot expect the golden years to magically return without a serious investment now. California is at a crossroads and may never regain our status as the eighth largest economy in the world if we continue to elect people who mislead us on education. China, India and Europe are investing in brain capital while we put money into our war industry and argue over tax cuts for the very rich.
In ten years, if we continue on our current path, California will be short one million college graduates. Where will we get them? We need strong leaders now who are willing to fight for our children’s future. Those elected politicians who refuse to invest in education now will be to blame when we find ourselves a third world state, mired in a low wage, low education, prison based economy. Let’s get leaders like Melissa elected because our collective future is at stake.
Does a four year degree now take five and a half years because of cut-backs in the number of classes offered and the difficulty in getting into a series of classes needed to complete a major?
From what I am hearing, the new reality is three years in community college, followed by two and a half years at a UC or Cal State.
What’s horrible about this is that the state made large increases in tuition and fees, but then cut the number of classes available, and crammed the existing ones. Pay more, get far less.
Lets elect someone like Melissa who seems to know the real crisis with the community college system! As a product of Community college, I am very concerned that the system is not catering to the students and public as it should!
During these hard times investing in education is the wisest choice, so that we will have an educated work force to compete when things get better. I like the idea of an “oil extraction fee”, this could be invested in vocational programs that would help build industries in US! And much more!
Our Community College system is the best deal for education in the country. What is going on in Sacramento has to stop; budgets need attention; elected officials need to respond to our state and student needs. Right now the California community college system provides an education to 2.9 million students and many have to fight to get classes. We need educated and trained citizens. Our future generations will depend on this system more and more and it should get full support.You will not find a more devoted faculty than those professors and adjunct faculty members in our community college districts. I ask our electeds and our future electeds, like Melissa Fox, to keep our children and our college system as a top priority.
Jim Moreno
Ms. Fox forgot to mention the crushing unfunded liabilities from public employees’ generous benefits packages, the state house majority’s insistence on raising taxes after the largest tax increase in history failed to close the budget deficit, the cap-and-trade regulations that will further cripple our economy (particularly those small businesses Ms. Fox claims to be supporting so strongly), the state legislature’s interest in passing nanny law after nanny law rather than address the fiscal crisis, etc. But I’m sure those just slipped her mind. And as Ms. Fox likely knows, the prisoner cost is due in large part to the sweetheart deal the prisoner guard union “negotiated” with our faux-Republican governor. Oddly, I couldn’t find pension reform anywhere on her website. It must be another oversight.
Newbie wondered what Melissa Fox has to say about public employee pensions. Here is her answer from the OC Register:
OC Register: What is your position on current public employee pensions? What policies would you advance or change?
Melissa Fox: There is tremendous anger about public employee pensions in California and I share that anger. I am angry about the way that our elected officials have used unfunded “down the road” deferred payments of public employee pensions to create phony “balanced” budgets without cutting services. I am angry about the misuse of pension fund earnings for disastrous real estate investments and politicians’ pet projects. I am angry about the manipulation of accounting rules to hide the size of our pension debt and commitments to retiree medical care from the voters, and I am angry about the manipulation of pension rules to allow employees to engage in “doubling dipping” and the spiking of pension benefits.
All of this must change.
Angry rhetoric alone, however, will not solve the problem. Nor will we be able to solve our pension and retiree health care liabilities by focusing solely on changes for newly hired public employees. While neither the Governor nor the legislature can simply impose retroactive changes in public employee pensions, I disagree with Governor Schwarzenegger that “we cannot do anything about the pension promises that have already made.” Instead, I believe that the extent of California’s budget crisis is so severe that it is in the interests of everyone involved, including the public employee unions, to agree to comprehensive public employee pension reform. I call upon the Governor, the Legislature, and the public employee union to begin working on such comprehensive pension reform immediately.
Among the changes in California’s public employee pension system that I would support as part of a comprehensive reform are changing retirement categories and ages, computing final compensation based on a worker’s highest salary over three years instead of just one, requiring state pension funds to disclose more information, and moving all government employees to the point where they are contributing half of the cost of their pensions contribution. I also strongly support the bills that are currently before the Legislature to eliminate pension spiking – in which public employees count pay hikes in their final year of work, such as cashed-out vacation time and career-end bonuses, toward their pension payouts – and double dipping – in which employees can collect a pension while still working the same or similar job. These abusive practices can and should be eliminated immediately.
Comprehensive pension reform is necessary, and needs to come in open negotiations where all stakeholders, including our teachers, firefighters, and police officers and their representatives are participating in solutions. It is time to stop playing political games with pension reform and the budget, in which both Democrats and Republican seek to use voter anger to score short-term political gains while our state continues to be crushed under a mountain of debt.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/candidates-248835-guiding-principles.html?data=1&appSession=74076294226664&RecordID=34&PageID=3&PrevPageID=2&cpipage=1&CPIsortType=&CPIorderBy=#article-data
This is great, thank you. I hadn’t even seen it, so I imagine Newbie hasn’t either.
Melissa should write these ideas up into a post, or maybe I should do it for her. It would neutralize a lot of this knee-jerk assumption that she would be a thoughtless wasteful union tool.