Editorial: Education is taking a nose-dive
Tempest Staff, Staff Writer
March 7, 2012
Filed under Editorial, Top Stories
Many SCC students were shocked and dismayed to find that summer session has been cancelled. This comes on the tail end of numerous recent negative events. As a refresher:
-Just after accreditation sanctions were just lifted, SCC was put back on “warning” by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.
- Fifteen programs were placed on “program discontinuance review” last fall, then administration changed their minds and reversed the decision.
-Administration is considering cutting campus police.
-Administration reorganizes college divisions and is now considering undoing part of the reorganization.
-Administration determines they must cut $5 million from budget and decides to cut summer school.
These are crucial issues that affect each and every student attending SCC, but they still come as a shock to all of us. Have you ever received a single email through your school account regarding these decisions? Or been given a notice before it affected you so you could make arrangements to get courses through another school?
The lack of communication with students is frustrating and insulting. Even ASSC student government was informed about summer school only one day before the decision was made. ASSC student government should have been among the primary stake-holders on campus to be consulted about the possibility of cutting summer session.
Students are left to fend for themselves and are forced to react with almost no information. Even The Tempest is excluded from the campus emails that are sent to all faculty, staff and ASSC, despite the fact we have requested to be in the loop.
Many students that planned to transfer based on summer courses are now held hostage for another semester. Others needed those courses to graduate, thus impacting them even further. At the very least we are owed an open and honest explanation as to what is going on. The administration and faculty have jobs because of the students that attend Solano, and it should be their priority to inform and assist students.
It is up to all of us to embrace this new economic reality and plan ahead for more bumps in the road. We need to face these ongoing hardships and get used to more sacrifice.
As students, we need to unify our voices and make it known, and well known, that we are nothing to sit down quietly while the college crumbles around us.
