Budget Cuts Tear Apart College Students’ Hopes

Since January, the historically hard-to-hold attention of many Californians has been riveted by sobering projections of a $35-billion budget shortfall and the accompanying paranoia over which state-funded programs will be reduced, slashed or eliminated. Overlooked in the heated political battles over bottom lines are the stories of what Studs Terkel once called “the everyday people” and the effects that devastating budget cuts will have on their lives.

One such story is unspooling now on east Hollywood’s Vermont Avenue, home of L.A. City College, often cited as the most multicultural community college in America.

We’re all familiar with City College students. They’re clerks and cabdrivers, mechanics and receptionists, waitresses and parking lot attendants, security guards, single mothers on welfare, ex-gangbangers and ex-cons. We know their names: Jose, Gohar, Ching, Anivacillia, Maria, Yugenia and Willy. They’re the minorities, the recent immigrants, the ones who speak with accents and never quite know enough English to please us. They flock to places like City in pursuit of the American dream, to pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps, and their paramount goal is to achieve English proficiency.

Only now there’s a problem. The English/ESL program has been decimated. Cuts made in Sacramento bleed on Vermont Avenue. They have drained away 17 adjunct English faculty positions this term. They have slashed 41% of the offered hours in English, cutting classes in English or English as a second language for nearly 2,000 students.

And these cuts have resulted in the virtual destruction of the symbolic heart of the department, the Writing Center, a home away from home for thousands of students over the years.

Operating now on a subsistence level, the Writing Center will shut down its computers and close its doors by fall because the money for 10 English tutors and two supervisors, $80,000 a year, was eliminated in January.

In realistic terms, what this means for students -- many of them alumni of inadequate L.A. Unified schools who have enormous difficulty reading and writing at college level -- is the increased retaking of classes. It also probably heralds higher failure and attrition rates, fewer transfers and fewer graduates.

In what might be the cruelest of ironies, it’s possible from the windows of the Writing Center to gaze upon the Hollywood sign in the hills above the school. In the shadow of a sign that epitomizes dreams, the message at the bottom of the hill is clear: There will never be a level field of opportunity to help everyone’s dreams come true. And for that reason alone, many will fail.

Or as writer Langston Hughes said, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Does it fester like a sore? ... Or does it explode?” Life will go on, as it always does on the streets of east Hollywood. But it just got a whole lot tougher.