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TUESDAY, JULY 20, 2010
Volume 9 Issue 215
Santa Monica Daily Press
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THE TOUGH DECISIONS ISSUE
School board brings back counselors BY KEVIN HERRERA Editor in Chief
SMMUSD HDQTRS Despite severe funding cuts at
Brandon Wise brandonw@smdp.com
HOLD THAT POSE: Yoga instructor Marsha Cooper (left) instructs her class of seniors at Emeritus College last week.
Senior citizens feel the burn of budget cuts BY REBECCA KHEEL Special to the Daily Press
SMC Natalie Lewis can’t believe that at 78 years old she is able to do a handstand. She gained the strength and flexibility to accomplish the feat in a yoga class at Santa Monica’s Emeritus College; a class she has taken for 10 years and said she could not have done it without her teacher, Marsha Cooper. “There’s alternatives, but I love that class because she teaches traditional poses, and some poses are stretches that are phenomenal for an older person,” Lewis said. But come Saturday, the last day of the summer session at Emeritus, Cooper’s section of the yoga class will no longer be offered. With public colleges across California scrambling to compensate for state budg-
et cuts, an unlikely demographic in Santa Monica has been caught in the crossfire — senior citizens. “A lot of people are really heartbroken,” Lewis said. As administrators at Santa Monica College, which runs Emeritus, planned its fall schedule earlier in June, it cut 3 percent of all offerings to account for decreases in state funding. Those cuts included four classes at its senior citizen program. Last fiscal year, SMC’s budget was $341.4 million. “The college doesn’t want to make cuts at all,” said Katharine Muller, dean of external affairs for SMC. “In tight budget times, everybody wants it to be something else. The cuts made are not an indictment of value. Making cuts is not easy, and the decision is not made lightly.” The ratio of cuts from Emeritus amounts to the same as SMC’s credit pro-
gram, Muller said. Two sections of yoga, one section of tai chi and one section of aerobics were cut from Emeritus’ fall schedule. Emeritus received a $1.038 million donation in March from the estate of Zelda Herman, a former student who died in May of 2009. Some who have been affected by the decrease in class offerings said they think the money should go toward paying salaries to avoid cuts, but Muller said the money has been put in the endowment, called the Santa Monica College Foundation. “You can’t subsidize salaries with foundation money,” she said. The professors at Emeritus are never guaranteed their class will be coming back, as they are part-time and adjunct faculty hired on a semester-to-semester SEE CUTS PAGE 6
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the state level, education officials last week decided it was more important to bring back counselors than to save money. The school board chose to reinstate three counselors (one at Malibu High School, which previously lost two, one at Lincoln Middle School and one to be split between John Adams Middle School and Olympic High School) and bring back one college counselor at Santa Monica High. Members of the board felt it was necessary to bring back the counselors because the student-tocounselor ratio was just too high at the school sites to be effective and provide proper guidance to students and their parents, said school board vice president Ralph Mechur, who pushed for the college counselor at Samohi, which would have had only two for an estimated 3,000 students. “We felt it would be a real disservice to not have these counselors, who provide support to our students,” Mechur said. “I was particularly concerned about Samohi because we didn’t have the personnel in place to help those kids who may be the first in their family to go to college and may not know the process [of applying for schools and financial aid].” The reinstatement of the counselors is expected to cost roughly $320,000. The school board cut the counselors in May as part of a $7.1 million reduction in spending, the result of Measure A’s inability to gain the two-thirds support of voters needed for passage. Measure A was an emergency parcel tax of $198 per parcel that would have generated roughly $5.7 million annually for five years. It failed mainly because of a lack of support from Malibu voters. Malibu High was hit the hardest by the counseling cuts as it was going to have to share two counselors with the middle school. According to district officials, that would have meant a student-tocounselor ratio of 577 to 1. Brian Kelly, principal at Malibu High, which serves students in grades six through 12, said he was grateful for the additional counselor. “I think we will definitely be able to better serve our students,” he said. “We will still feel the loss of one of our counselors.” news@smdp.com
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