CAMPUS CLOSED FOR

“For example I run the pre-vet program and we have a pre-vet degree here. Most of my students don’t get their A.S. degree and the reason why is that if they get accepted to vet school they want to go,” Shapiro said. “I had another person get accepted yesterday, she’s number 212. They don’t consider how many transfer so they say ‘You don’t have any certificates or degrees.’ I say, ‘Yeah but I have 212 people who’ve made it to vet school’ but they’re not looking at that.”

The horticulture staff has been scaled down due to employees retiring and no one being hired to replace them. This has led to a snowball effect in the department where fewer classes are available so fewer degrees and certificates are awarded.

Once the moratorium is lifted by the LACCD Board of Trustees, the Agriculture Department will still have to wait as the LACCD building program, which can also be found through build-laccd.org, projects that Pierce’s horticulture facility will be completed by 2017.

Paul Nieman, director of plant facilities, expanded on some of the issues with funding the project while the moratorium is still in place.

“The horticulture building is slated for a renovation and it’s slated to get rid of the old greenhouse and provide a new greenhouse,” Nieman said. “When we realized that we didn’t have the money that we had to begin with, everybody had to contribute to a new districtwide contingency on construction and that meant we all had to send money, and we lost a lot, so things had to get resized.”

Nieman continued to say that they must get approval from the board to move forward. Every program, to his knowledge, goes through a viability study at one point or another.