KBCC radio started dying in 1995 and had completely been removed from the BC curriculum by 1998. A mixture of depleted funds and low enrollment in the department were the main reasons as to why a campus radio station is no longer in session.
“As my memory serves me correctly, those years were fairly lean for the college,” said then Dean of Instruction David Rosales, “it was mostly a time that if hiring was done, it was done on a replacement basis.”
With the departure of full-time advisor Ron Dethlefson in 1986, there was not enough funding to hire a full-time adviser. When Dethlefson left KBCC in 1986, he retired from advising the radio station, but not from teaching at BC.
Rosales continued, “Since Dethlefson did not retire but transferred, we did not replace one-with-one.”
The school was able to hire an adviser on a part-time basis, but part-time was not enough time to deal with the responsibilities of running a radio station.
The students who were still involved with the radio station were having trouble maintaining the station.
“I got screwed because I was covering a lot of shifts,” said music director from ’91-’93 George McArthur. “I was missing classes because I was covering a shift and people weren’t doing their slots. People stopped caring.”
McArthur Continued, “It’s kind of dumb when everyone wanted (the station) dead but you’re too stupid to realize it. Over the years student interest dwindled and at one point we realized that the students weren’t getting paid anymore money at a radio station if they went through our program or if they just walked off the street,” said former President of BC from 1983-1997 Rick Wright.
The students may not get paid anymore money from going through the program at BC, but the knowledge and experience they received was priceless.
“The degree itself is the most useless thing in the world,” said McArthur, “If you go to a radio station and say ‘hey I got a communications degree, they are going to say ‘Hey, way to go. Show me how you use it.” He went on, “that piece of paper itself doesn’t get me the job. But the knowledge that I received does.”
Not just ordinary routine task knowledge either, but knowledge through being put into various situations that force one to think spontaneously.
“Getting rid of all these programs that help you get a communications degree takes away from people learning to think with different parts of their brain,” said McArthur. “You have to do a lot of thinking right there on the spot. There were countless times where I’m trying to get a CD to work while I’m telling jokes or talking to fill up time all while I’m ripping apart and fixing the CD player. From a business point of view,” said Wright, “if there is no value to the institution then why keep funding the program.”
“We were in a budget cutting mode in those days. Funding from the state was not very forthcoming,” said Rosales.
Rosales continued, “programs need to generate money to exist. Whether it be by the enrollment or ads. It would have been nice if the student body and the student government would have helped with the radio station funding so the (enrollment) generation would not have been such a factor.”
The enrollment for the class was not very large as Cindy Needham said at one point there were as few as eight people participating.
Rosales described how the funding from the radio station began filtering its way into different programs on campus, but could not state exactly where the money went.
There is a general fund that the money was placed into and the college was able to do with it what they wanted.