Voices from the March

San Diego City College instructor Jim Miller collected letters from students, parents and teachers about how budget cuts have impacted their lives. Here is the fourth installment in an occasional series that will share their stories.

DENISE BLIKE, Student at San Diego City College

One reason my parents decided to move our family from Hawaii to California was because of the schools. Because the public schools in Hawaii aren’t very good, my parents had planned to go the usual route of private from kindergarten through twelfth grade. For college they would do what many of their friends had done for their kids: send us to the mainland, California.

California public schools are said to be some of the best in the country, even though there is always a threat of losing a librarian or the marching band through budget cuts. And after high school, there is the promise of going to a UC or CSU. They offer education that is comparable to private colleges, at half the price. Yet even though they cost much less, my parents exist in the middle-class gap between making too much to qualify for financial aid, but not enough to comfortably pay tuition. They will have to struggle to put the three of us through college, especially when my sister and I are in school at the same time. We work to pay our share, but it won’t be enough. Loans are the only option.

My sister is at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and I’m in San Diego at a community college, working on transferring to UCSD. But yet again, Sacramento has cut what little funding schools already have. If I transfer to UCSD I look forward to paying 32 percent more tuition. I look forward to classrooms packed far beyond their capacity, taught by long-suffering adjuncts who teach at five schools a day because no college will offer them a long-term job or stability. The tension over budget cuts means that schools are constantly in upheaval and this instability affects our education. Yes, it is a privilege to go to college, but if college degrees are the minimum for most jobs then why are colleges continually losing funding even as student enrollment increases every year? We can’t get a job without a degree, yet we can’t pay for college because we don’t have a job and because colleges are forced to increase tuition to make up for the lack of money allocated in the budget. The burden falls to the student.

Ironically, my dad has recently taken a job in Hawaii because it will pay a bit more. He’s going alone though; my mom will stay behind so my little brother can finish his last year of high school before, presumably, going off to one of California’s public universities.

SAMIR ROY, Student at SDCC

It took many years for me to make my way back to getting a college education. I am now 30 years old, applying for transfer to schools I now have to borrow much more money to attend than just a few years ago. For so long I harbored such fear of my future that I tried to block out any chance of a good one. Hope for me wasn’t just a stranger, it was an antagonist, a succubus of time and energy. Now that I’ve emerged from that dark place and found such hope again it seems that the state no longer cares what happens to those of us, young and old, who subsist on it. Students desperate for the one class they need have the air of poker players down to their last stack of chips. Threats, both verbal and physical, break out over parking spaces in college lots clogged with clusters of automobiles. Students literally racing to get an add code before someone else gets it, knock others out of their way to do so. The waits last 30 minutes, and many times more, just to fill out one form, in understaffed administrative offices that reek of despairing resignation to lower pay and higher expectations. College is now a place where a single error of judgment (even one as miniscule as getting in the wrong line), politeness, or an act of kindness, can cost you a whole semester’s worth of time. Time I do not have anymore.

These are all symptomatic of an education system in which the demand far outstrips the supply, and we all suffer as a result. This world of more students and less funding has transformed us for the worse. We students are now as vultures, competing to feast on the carrion of a class schedule left in the wake of the last devastating cuts. If I am ever to become the man that my friends, my family and my departed father always saw in me, the person I tried so hard to kill from neglect, the person I can now finally see in myself, it’s a travesty that living up to my potential will eat up even more money and time. Though my own problems kept my father from seeing his only son excel before he died, there is nothing in this world that can vitiate the failure to reach my goals now simply because the state failed to adequately invest in education. I can see no improved outcome in the state’s future from shortchanging students and teachers.

BRIAN PIKE, Teacher at McKinley Elementary, San Diego Unified School District

I have been teaching for 32 years, most of which have been here at McKinley. We all face a challenge with looming budget cuts in California. My biggest fear is a return to enormous class sizes. "Factory style" education -- one size fits all -- does not work! Good education requires a reasonable teacher to student ratio at all levels of education. At the fourth grade level, I would say 25 would be the limit. We all hope we can keep class size down to respectable numbers.

ALEJANDRA VARGAS, Student at San Diego City College

As a cancer survivor in the third year of remission, the budget cuts to California’s education system are particularly cruel while I’m attempting to gain medical insurance, which is a constant struggle since I have preexisting conditions.
I'm 21, work a part time (sometimes full-time) and attend school full-time. I worry constantly about paying bills, my health and, now, whether I can afford school at all.

The budget cuts affect all students, faculty, etc to varying degrees, but it is hardly ever the only financial hardship or concern. These only unnecessarily exacerbate financial hardships.