Trending toward a small college Non-enrollment affects Pierce’s budget and student participation

BY ANASTASIYA OREL

The Los Angeles Pierce College Council met Thursday afternoon to discuss large percentages of non-enrollment and the trajectory of the college's budget.

Interim President Ara Aguiar said the administration has been working with AFT 1521 in establishing a local-level project to combine online and in-person classroom instruction.

“Just like the Cleared4 is a condition of employment for all faculty and staff, it is going to be in essence a condition of enrollment for onsite classes or activities,” Aguiar said. “With our enrollment problem, I’m very concerned. We really need to support our students.”

Aguiar said the administration is being supplied with training with providing assistance to students for on-campus class and cohort programs and will be implemented for the next few weeks.

AFT 1521 Chapter President Brian Walsh said the pilot program is looking to move toward a total class cap of forty with a maximum of twenty eight in-person and twelve remote classroom instruction options.

“We do want to have flexibility for students to have the option to enroll in whichever,” Walsh said. “We are going to turn the OWLS into tools. We've got hundreds of these in every classroom. It’s going to change your pedagogy and have additional burdens and classroom management.”

Walsh said that due to the difficulty of the transition, the administration will be providing a stipend system for $500 per credit hours for every class that each faculty and staff individual converts to the dualdelivery pilot program.

Vice President of Administrative Services Rolf Schleicher said the Los Angeles Community College District Chancellor held a meeting with over 600 participants to address un-enrollment within Pierce College. “We are trending down to be a small college which should be a concern for everybody,” Schleicher said. “It drives everything. We got to make sure that Pierce is focusing on the main show and continuing to deliver in those areas. That’s why we’re going to the state budget committee.”

Schleicher said 96% of the college’s budget is in labor, making it difficult to address competing needs.

“It’s not just getting a budget and spending it, because we have competing needs,” Schleicher said. “We need to get more students in, increase our grants, increase our enterprise activities and then spend wisely.”

Schleicher said that Pierce has a hundred million dollar budget and the college’s run rates are roughly five million dollars over.

“We have money to shore that up at the moment and we’re trying to apply that because coming out of the pandemic is really horrific,” Schleicher said. “Pierce has done a fantastic job of managing through the pandemic but there are some incredible pressures on us as a district.”

Dean of Academic Affairs Mary Anne Gavarra-Oh said the winter semester is at 70% of last year’s enrollment and 98% of the section count.The spring registration posting is enforcing proof of vaccination from students in order to allow enrollment.

“The spring schedule as of Nov. 4 was 46.9% in person, 7.4% hybrid, and 46% are online,” Gavaraa-Oh said. “As we move forward, we are adding more classes based on demand to open more face-toface sections. We also revisited the enrollment barriers task force as it was brought about in response to the enormous drop.”

Gavarra-Oh said her department has created a task force to tackle the drop in enrollment. They are trying to look at the barriers students are encountering now due to COVID and establish solutions.

Math Instructor Sheri Lehavi said the Technology Standing Committee has been continuously reviewing the charter and paying attention to Pierce’s needs.

“We’re still kind of in a transition phase with that oversight of IT being at the district,” Lehavi said. “Some of those things are still new so we have some goals in there to make sure that Pierce’s needs get met and not lost in what the district is doing versus us.”

Pierce College librarian and Guided Pathways representative Lisa Valdez said her department has been working on success teams and have been creating cohorts to be hosted within the upcoming winter and spring semesters.

“We also had something called a transformation train,” Valdez said. “What we do is once a month, we find a problem that we try to solve and this week was how to help students change their major and how to streamline that process. We brought several departments to the table to help us and we have some temporary solutions for now.”