With the 2013 fall semester underway, new teachers are being hired to fit the sudden demand of classes being added at El Camino.

During the fiscal crisis in 2008, community colleges across the state experienced having to cut classes.

For the past four years, more than $20 billion dollars have been cut from public education in California, along with the layoff of thirty-thousand educators. In the end, adjunct teachers faced uncertainty about their jobs.

“We went through what we call a period of retrenchment, a down-swing, kind of less classes,” Constance Fitzsimons, dean of fine arts, said. “We began to have to cut classes and offer less classes and it kept continuing through 2009 and 2010 and so forth, consequently the part-time adjuncts actually loss their assignments.”

Now that Proposition 30 has passed, the budget cuts that the state experienced in years past is now being funded, therefore, resulting in classes being added and teachers being hired to teach those classes.

With the budget crisis burden lifted temporarily, community colleges around the state are anticipating what administrators and teachers would call growth. This growth they’re referring to, in terms of students, is the ability to add classes back in schools.

“With the good budget news came the need for more part-time teachers to teach the added sections,” Elise Geraghty, associate dean of humanities, said. “At the community college level, we’ve got the news from the state of California as a result of this good budget news that we had a larger budget to work with.”

Although the economy hasn’t fully recovered, you get the sense that it is in rehabilitation. The state of the California Community College system is gradually moving from where it was, when teachers were laid off, to the recent high demand of teachers to satisfy the number of classes added.

This semester, more and more teachers have been hired than in recent memory. The hiring of adjuncts and newly added assignments for teachers is a clear sign of progress in California’s public education system.

“From an adjunct’s perspective, it’s nice that more work is becoming available,” Anna Mavromati, part time-journalism instructor, said.

As the number of classes increase, the number of students increase along with them, subsequently raising the possibility of needing even more adjunct teachers.

“School budgets haven’t had the most money to spare over the past few years, so I’d like to think it’s a really good sign that more adjuncts are being hired and that more classes are being offered to our students,” Mavromati said.