Chemeketa Community College Cuts Adjunct Jobs to Balance Budget
Chemeketa Community College will cut 20 percent of its courses taught by part-time faculty this fall to balance its budget.
The reduction will save about $700,000, but it will mean between 350 and 400 fewer class sections this year at the school’s main northeast Salem campus and smaller sites across the Mid-Willamette Valley.
Chemeketa officials aim to save another $350,000 through cuts to student services, administration, security and other areas.
Chief financial officer Craig Smith said the state budget crisis has placed Chemeketa in its worst financial position since the early 1980s.
Schools receive about 70 percent of their operating money from the state.
College President Gretchen Schuette sent a memo this week to each of Che-meketa’s roughly 1,000 employees, outlining her concerns with the budget.
Chief among them was the impact of a potential veto by Gov. John Kitzhaber of the Legislature’s plan to bail out Oregon school finances. The veto would slice $56 million from the state’s 17 community colleges, or about one-fourth of their overall budgets.
Kitzhaber has said the Legislature’s plan is irresponsible because it relies heavily on loans, accounting maneuvers and one-time withdrawals. On Wednesday, he gave fresh warning that he may issue at least one veto affecting public schools and community colleges.
Schuette said Chemeketa already has changed its long-range financial outlook as a result of the recession, but there is no contingency plan for the level of cuts that would be required by a veto.
“Both the amount and the timing of this kind of budget cut would be devastating,” she wrote in this week’s memo. “Even if we eliminated all classes taught by part-time faculty, and closed our Dallas, McMinnville, Santiam and Woodburn campuses, we would still need to find additional cuts of between $1 (million) and $2 million.”
The memo caught the attention of Nancy Battaile, a part-time math teacher at the northeast Salem campus.
Battaile said her seniority –she came to Chemeketa in 1980–likely would preserve her from the brunt of the cuts to part-time staff. But she said the impact will be real, especially for part-timers who have few benefits and who patch together an income between jobs at two or more schools.
Dee Montgomery-Smith, president of the Chemeketa Part-time Education Association, said about half of her group’s 700 members count on Chemeketa as their main source of income. The 20 percent cut will be spread across all campuses and departments, adding up to the equivalent of about 25 full-time positions.
Making the situation worse, she said, is the fact that Kitzhaber could announce his veto decision as late as Aug. 9, just weeks before fall semester starts.
Chemeketa’s budget cuts for this fall come on top of an additional $1.3 million that was cut earlier this year to balance the school’s $55.25 million general fund budget.
Those cuts included the closure of a child-care program, targeted layoffs and increased parking fees. Tuition also went up $4 per credit hour this summer, the largest increase in two decades.
The effect on this fall’s enrollment is unclear. Chemeketa served the equivalent of 12,730 full-time students during the past 12 months, up 1.7 percent from 2000-01.
President Schuette said the budget cuts will have long-term implications regardless of their depth.
Some specific initiatives that could suffer, she said: services at the satellite campuses, improvements in online technology and distance learning, buying instructional equipment for vocational programs and additions to the two-year transfer degree program.
The planned expansion of the Woodburn campus won’t be affected by the cuts. That project, scheduled to be completed in phases starting in early 2004, is being funded by the school’s capital fund.
For other projects, Chemeketa officials are seeking extra grant money and private funding sources.
