Community College Cuts Protested : Budget: The governor’s plan to slash funding and raise fees is denounced as an attack on the two-year institutions and their large minority enrollment.

Calling Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposal to strip several hundred million dollars from California’s 107 community colleges a “massive attack” on the two-year institutions and their large numbers of minority and low-income students, leaders of the Los Angeles Community College District on Tuesday rallied to fight back.

“The governor simply doesn’t understand who comes to community colleges,” Wallace Knox, president of the nine-college district’s Board of Trustees told a news conference aimed at marshaling students and others to pepper the governor’s office with their protests.

Wilson’s plan would take up to $33 million from the Los Angeles system--equivalent to the amount it takes to run two of its campuses--Valley in Van Nuys and Southwest in the Athens area south of downtown--for a year, district officials said.

And his proposal to raise fees for a full-time student to $300 or more per semester would put higher education beyond the grasp of many students because about a third of the district’s 120,000 students have annual family incomes of $12,000 or less, Knox said. Almost 70% of the district’s enrollment is from minority groups.

District officials estimated that 28,000 students would be prevented from attending, basing that figure in part on the proportion of students the district lost in 1983, when the Legislature set the first mandatory fee--a maximum of $50 a semester--for community colleges.

Struggling to close a $10.7-billion state budget gap, Wilson wants to give the community colleges an estimated $454 million less than he proposed in January, or $178 million less than the state spent on the colleges during the last fiscal year. Additionally, he is calling for an increase in general fees--currently $6 a unit, with a maximum charge of $60 per semester--to $20 per unit, with no cap. For students who already have accumulated 90 college credits, the fee would climb to an average of $90 per unit, an increase Knox said would hit hard at unemployed aerospace and other workers returning to the colleges for new careers.

The governor has said it is necessary for everyone in California to share in the budget cutting if the state is to stay solvent during a stubborn recession, and he argues that the college reduction would be appreciably alleviated by the fee increases.

But opponents argue that many students could not afford to continue and say the community college cuts statewide would hit disadvantaged minorities especially hard. That is because more than 75% of all higher-education minority students in the state are enrolled at the two-year colleges.

“It is incredible that a governor who opposes raising taxes would impose (what amounts to) a fat new tax on community college students,” said longtime college board member Lindsay Conner, who also is president of the California Community College Trustees.

Noting that many of the Los Angeles district’s students live in areas devastated by last spring’s riots, Conner added: “You cannot rebuild L. A. by tearing down the dream of higher education.”

Knox and Conner joined a score of other college district officials and staff at Los Angeles City College in enlisting students, on campus for the opening of the fall semester, to telephone the governor’s office. They also urged students to attend a rally at Democratic state Sen. David A. Roberti’s Los Angeles office later in the day and implore him to “hang tough” against Wilson’s proposals.

“Please get on the telephone . . . grab up postcards, write on the back of envelopes,” pleaded district Chancellor Donald G. Phelps.

Under the governor’s plan, City College would be forced to drop 500 classes--or one-fourth of its educational program--from its spring semester offerings, President Jose L. Robledo said. Such a cut would cost the college 300 faculty members, 100 clerical and other workers and about 6,000 students, Robledo estimated.

“Can we afford to have the state budget balanced on our backs?” Erica Hauk, student representative on the local Board of Trustees asked the crowd.

“No!” was the shouted response of 200 students.