Eight million dollars.

Let us repeat that, $8 million.

El Camino’s current proposed Academic Affair Plan for the 2017-18 school year lists several expenditures that the school definitely needs to improve campus life.

But on that list is a proposal that we find questionable.

It aims to “build a joint services Public Safety Training Center” for the Fire Tech Department, amounting to an $8 million request, according to the unprioritized area plan.

Stephanie Rodriguez, dean of industry and technology said that this has been in the works since about 2009, but it wasn’t until newly elected president Dena Maloney came on board when the project took off.

Despite Director of Community Relations Ann Garten saying that Maloney didn’t know about the $8 million project.

Stephanie Rodriguez, dean of industry and technology, said that Maloney was one of the biggest contributors to the project moving forward.

Rodriguez added that this is projected to bring in a massive amount of students that would ultimately return for yearly training.

We believe that this proposal is too large an amount of money that is going toward a smaller section of programs (Fire Tech, EMT, Police Academy, etc.).

This $8 million is not an expense the school should be spending while we’re in stabilization.

We do agree that expenditures of money to help students learn, train and get better is the correct way to teach them, but $8 million is a ridiculous amount of money for not even a tenth of a percent of students.

Even if you include the students it would help over the next two semesters, that’s approximately 1,113 students that this joint training facility would help.

Almost 2,000 students were able to graduate in 2016, which means that just one graduation at Murdock Stadium benefits more students on one day than this $8 million facility will over three semesters of students.

We understand that graduation is just a one-day event and the Fire Tech Department will most likely use the facility for its own graduation and the students will be able to use the facility whenever they want, but this expenditure isn’t helping other students.

For reference the newly-rebuilt Murdock Stadium was listed at $40 million and has a fully-built track, a state of the art design and artificial turf for the field, as reported on The Union.

Who uses Murdock:

• EC football players, men’s and women soccer players, P.E. classes in the fall.
• All athletes including the badminton, basketball, tennis, swim and dive, water polo and volleyball (men’s, women’s and beach) teams all use it for the training facility.
• Other student athletes from other schools get to play on it.
• Graduating students get walk on the field during commencement.
• Just recently, the L.A. City Track and Field Champions were hosted at Murdock and one of the biggest T&F events in the country the Mt. SAC Relays were hosted there as well.

Murdock Stadium has much more use and potential for its $40 million cost, especially if you begin to add up the numbers.

Whereas this new proposed joint training facility will benefit just students in the Fire Tech Department.

Students from everywhere and even community members who live near EC can use Murdock, whether it’s for training purposes or just walking the track, which can be seen on a daily basis.

We think that trying to provide for students a better education and quality of training is the correct choice moving forward.

However, we don’t believe that some facility that could potentially be used more by TFD and is based on the prospect of incoming students is necessary for an expense of $8 million.