California Proposition 92, which would have lowered student fees to $15 per unit and locked in state community college funding, failed in the Feb. 5 primary, splitting teachers’ unions in the process.
Under the current formula, established after passage of voter-approved Proposition 98 in 1988, community colleges are funded in conjunction with elementary and high schools, referred to as K-12. The California legislature established that community colleges would receive 10-11 percent of Proposition 98 funds.
However, Sacramento often allocates community colleges’ 10-11 percent for other uses, according to Bakersfield College Academic Senate president John Gerhold and other organizations in the community college system. Thus, the umbrella organization Californians for Improving Community Colleges was founded to get Proposition 92 on the ballot.
Along with the aforementioned mandates, Proposition 92 sought to allocate 10.46 percent of Proposition 98 funding and not allow legislators to change funding. It would have also established a new funding formula for community colleges based on young adult populations rather than K-12 enrollment, the current statistic used under Proposition 98, according to the California Primary Official Voter Information Guide. Gerhold felt that Proposition 92 was going to give community colleges what they were promised under Proposition 98.
“Colleges didn’t set the 11 percent,” he said. “The legislature did. The legislature doesn’t honor that plan, but [Proposition] 92 says ‘thou shalt.’ ”
However, Californians For Fair Education Funding, the umbrella organization of groups opposed to Proposition 92, argued that Proposition 92 did not provide any accountability to California community colleges, citing a stipulation in the bill that the minimum funding level could only be changed by a four-fifths vote from the legislature. Newspaper editorials opposed to Proposition 92 felt it was badly timed around a drastic California budget crisis.
A Jan. 4 editorial in the Bakersfield Californian called Proposition 92 “bad ballot-box budgeting,” saying that “the increased spending without increased revenues comes at a time when California’s already predicted to come up $14 billion short.”
According to Student Government Association Senator Matthew Cuellar, Prop. 92 was shot down “by another one of my colleagues, which kind of upset me because that would really help out community college students.”
Gerhold agreed that Proposition 92 suffered from poor timing but added that “it’s something that needs to be done for the colleges.”
While the California Federation of Teachers supported Proposition 92, the California Teachers Association was against it, claiming the proposition would “jeopardize funding for K-12 schools.”
This, according to Gerhold, who is a CTA member and a music professor on campus, was a tactic to protect K-12 interests. “They like that they can steal from [the community colleges’] 11 percent,” said Gerhold.
Had the bill failed by a narrow margin, Gerhold said, the organizations supporting Proposition 92 would have attempted to present the legislature with a bill similar to Proposition 92. Since it lost by such a large margin, however, Gerhold felt that California community colleges would “probably never get anything like this on the ballot again.