Schools

'Truly Mind-Boggling' Cuts Loom for Grossmont and Cuyamaca Colleges, Chancellor Says

Cindy Miles, newcomer to La Mesa and community college district, says nearly 800 class sections will be lost and 5,000 students turned away.

Cuts looming for Grossmont and Cuyamaca colleges are “truly mind-boggling,” says the leader of East County’s community college district, a new La Mesan who herself knows financial distress.

Under a “best-case” scenario, the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District would lose 600 course sections as a result of the state budget ax—after chopping 1,000 sections over the past two years, says Cindy Miles, chancellor since March 2009.

“We’re potentially cutting up to 20 percent of our course offerings”—under the best forecast, she said Friday—before Gov. Jerry Brown’s decision Tuesday to call off budget talks with Republicans on a June ballot on extending higher taxes.

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The district now is operating under “Plan B” revenue assumptions (see attached letter), said district spokeswoman Anne Krueger on Wednesday. That includes funding under Proposition 98—the 1988 voter-approved amendment to the state Constitution that led to a minimum annual funding level for K-12 schools and community colleges.

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“They’re gone,” Miles said.

Students already will face a steep rise in costs. Last Thursday, Brown signed into law a boost in student fees from $26 a credit unit to $36 a unit, starting this fall.

That money won’t go to colleges, Miles notes, but into the state’s general fund which pays for public schooling.

Like many other educators, Miles, 56, said Friday she would tell Republicans in the state Legislature to allow a Brown-backed bill to go forward that would let Californians decide on extending several state taxes.

“Let the voters decide on how they want to spend our tax dollar—whether they are willing to extend these taxes to make sure the education and future of their state is protected,” she said.

And like many Americans, she has suffered in the economy—taking a big loss to sell her home outside Miami before moving to a rental near The Village, which she shares with her only child—son Gabriel, a recent graduate of Florida International University.

“I was caught up in the real estate crash like everybody else,” Miles said Friday in an interview at her modest Grossmont College office. Her mortgage was “upside down”—meaning the home near Miami she bought in 2005 at the top of the market was worth less in 2009 than what she owed on it.

“I lost a lot of money, just like everyone else in the nation,” said Miles, whose three-year contract through 2012 pays $245,000 a year, not including $1,050 a month for auto and other expenses.

Unlike K-12 school districts, however, Miles says hers isn’t planning pink slips.

In a “Dear Colleagues” letter circulated Thursday, Miles wrote: “Let me again reassure you that we have no plans for layoffs and we are not considering this option as we work with our budget councils and employee groups to solve our problems. Even in a worst-case scenario, we would call on our employees to help develop solutions to share the pain of cost-cutting with our students.”

But fewer students would be admitted to the two-campus district under any budget scenario, she wrote. Under “Plan C,”  in fact, more than 1,000 additional classes would be cut—with 8,000 students turned away.

The district would freeze all but the state-mandated positions, purchase nothing but “indispensable items” and work with employee groups to identify “fair share” solutions—which could include voluntary furloughs, ending summer school and closing nonessential facilities.

But one effort that won’t end is a Department of Advancement Services in the chancellor’s office—a fundraising and “grant-development system that never existed” in the 50-year-old district.

“We’re very serious about this,” said Miles, who worked at Miami Dade Community College when it acquired a reputation as the most successful grant-generating community college in the nation.

“That’s a normal part of the job in the university [system],” she said of chancellors, likening them to CEOs. “But it’s not been on the radar screens” of community college leaders.

She said the former director of her old school’s fundraising foundation is a consultant for Grossmont-Cuyamaca but hasn’t been hired here.

“I’d like to,” she said with a smile. “I can’t afford him.”

However, Miles has hired a full-time person to lead the grant-writing effort—assigned last fall, she said.

Long Road to Grossmont-Cuyamaca

Cindy Miles—born July 29, 1954—grew up in Pasadena, TX, a lower-income “stepchild” suburb of Houston. Her father worked for Shell Oil, and back then Pasadena, with its aromatic paper mills, was known as “Stink-adena.”

She still has siblings in Texas—an attorney sister, Army Col. Rebecca Lange, expert in elder law, and an engineer brother known as “Thumper.” He even calls himself that, she said.

At age 16, having taken summer classes and sped up her education, Miles  graduated from high school and started the following Monday at a local community college.

She eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Texas at Austin and spent 12 years in medical technology before getting “bored with the lab.”

“I went back to get a master’s degree (in secondary and higher education from East Texas State University  in Commerce—now a branch of Texas A&M), and I wandered into a local community college to get a part-time job,” she said.

She wound up as a developmental math teacher “and fell in love with teaching and fell in love with the college,” Paris Junior College, near the Oklahoma border in northeast Texas.

She earned a doctorate in educational administration from the University of Texas at Austin and became a grant-writing star at a Denver community college. In 2005, as president she launched the Hialeah campus in the Miami-Dade college system.

She’d still be there but for a recruiter and what she called “very good friends and trusted mentors” who advised her to “look at this [Grossmont-Cuyamaca] position. This one’s unusual,” she recalled them as saying.

Omero Suarez was leaving the chancellor’s office after more than a decade, and Miles studied the district, which she found “very solid, very well-respected—great institution … that I thought I could match. They were looking at it as a fit. That was the ‘sell’ to me.”

The district—with 20,000 students at Grossmont College in El Cajon and 10,000 students at Cuyamaca College in Rancho San Diego—now serves 2,577 residents of the La Mesa ZIP codes of 91941 and 91942—mostly at Grossmont College (1,871 students). 

Spring Valley supplies the district 1,237 students, Santee 2,084 and Lemon Grove 874, according to enrollment figures for fall 2010.

The 1,138-square-mile district draws about half the graduates of the Grossmont Union High School District. More than 450,000 students have attended either Grossmont or Cuyamaca College since 1976.

Picking La Mesa and Falling in Love with the Town

Miles knew she’d live somewhere in the Grossmont-Cuyamaca district when she tasked her agent to look for a place to rent, but didn’t appreciate La Mesa until finding her home.

“I absolutely love La Mesa,” she said. “The community has really grown on me.”

She lives close enough to downtown that she can walk to The Village, she said.

“It has a small-town feel with all the accouterments of anything you’d want,” she said. 

She’s already eaten at many nearby restaurants (recommending them all) and as a walker has tried out the urban trail system, including the stairs of Mount Nebo, “a great workout.”

She says she goes to Oktoberfest, takes company to the summer car shows and has even been in the Flag Day Parade, riding in a car with a governing board member.

“La Mesa’s my town,” she says.

Looking Ahead to Potential College Improvements

Proposition R—a $207 million bond issue approved by voters in November 2002—is in its last projects (student services and administration building at Grossmont College).

But even after more than a dozen buildings at both campuses and a parking garage at Grossmont College, Miles still sees unmet needs—a building that would accommodate graduations, for example.

“Our needs in the future will be defined by our educational needs, so I’m not going to rattle off  ‘We need A, B or Z.’ … We use data to define those needs,” she said.

“But one that I can tell you is still lingering … that didn’t get met with the past Prop. R—there’s no proper theater or performing arts space at Grossmont College, other than a small black-box theater. … Cuyamaca has a theater but it only seats 350 people.”

She said the schools don’t have a place for dance or “to bring all our students together. We can’t do convocations. We’re still forced to do all our graduation ceremonies outdoors.”

But she said the district doesn’t draw up “wish lists.” 

Rather, “We base them entirely on what we define as the needs of East County.

“And that’s our job.”

Story updated at 10 a.m. March 30, 2011.


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