The student news site of El Camino College

El Camino College The Union

The student news site of El Camino College

El Camino College The Union

The student news site of El Camino College

El Camino College The Union

Budget cuts on campus affects everyone

Printing in the Writing Center was made unavailable to students after the recent additional budget cuts.

Barbara Budrovich, Writing Center Coordinator, said that the printing being unavailable has been a direct impact of the budget cuts.

“We’ve had reductions and had to suspend printing,” Budrovich said. “We don’t have the money to hire technicians to monitor and run these print requests.”

She added that the printers cannot be self-serve due to the students having abused the printers in the past.

A year ago, the Writing Center had additional funding from the Enrollment Management Committee that looks at ways to assist different supplemental programs to help them more effective, Arvid Spor, dean of Enrollment Services, said.

However, the funding was cut from the Enrollment Management Committee, so it has been unable to give the Writing Center additional funding, he added.

In addition to the Writing Center, the natural sciences division also has taken a hit as a result of the cuts, Jean Shankweiler, dean of natural sciences, said.

“Class cuts are the biggest problem we see,” she said. “The classes are sequential, so students have to go in order and if that class is full there is no other substitute.”

There seems to be more budget cuts in the future, Jeanie Nishime, vice president of Student and Community and Advancement, said.

“We definitely anticipate mid-year cuts of 2.5 percent. We will know by Dec. 15,” she said. “Summer, fall, winter and spring will be cut even further.”

President Tom Fallo said that if the budget continues to be cut, students will have to be turned away leaving a lot of them without classes.

Nishime said that last year, there were more than 19,000 full-time students while this year, there are about 18,000 full-time students.

Tuition is also on the rise from $36 a unit to $46 a unit, Nishime said.

Fallo said the legislature passed a bill, ABX1 32, that will delay the $10 tuition increase from winter session to summer session.

“Without this (bill), colleges likely would have to implement the fee increase with only a couple of weeks of notice,” Fallo said. “Administrators would be placed in the untenable position of trying to collect higher fees from students who had already completed registration for spring classes.”

Some students are against the idea of another increase, and had suggestions of their own as to how some of the budget cuts could be fixed.

“To help fix our budget, we should stop wasting money on unnecessary things like WiFi because we need more help like tutors and professors,” Jenny Guiterrez, 18, social work major, said. “There shouldn’t be a fee increase because things like books and classes are already expensive as is.”


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