SANTA MONICA UNIFIED AND COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT

I was somewhat apprehensive when I accepted the Santa Monica job because I had no community college experience. I did not understand the college organization or even how it was financed. I soon learned that Santa Monica College was a dinosaur in that it's Board of Education was also the Board for the Unified District, the only one in California that was so organized.

The Santa Monica School District was not large enough to warrant a community college but over the years they had worked out an arrangement with Los Angeles Community College District that allowed students from Los Angeles to attend Santa Monica under a contract and Los Angeles paid their tuition. This made Santa Monica quite a large institution.

The year I became Deputy Superintendent at Santa Monica, Los Angeles Board of Education canceled the contract between the two districts so that Santa Monica College was to lose over half of its enrollment. This meant that many of the College teachers would lose their jobs.

Reducing staff is a messy thing, to say the least, and there are many laws and policies that apply to staff reductions. In brief, all the laws and policies say that the "teachers hired last are the first to leave." It is a seniority requirement. Furthermore the procedure requires that people to be let go must be notified before May first of the previous year and there was very little time to draft notifications after Los Angeles canceled the contract.

A meeting of the college faculty was called and I was introduced as their new "Deputy Superintendent." I proceeded to explain the contract problem and told them that most of them would be getting a Registered letter stating that they might no longer have a job at the college. I tried to reassure them by pointing out that Los Angeles was not able to accommodate it's students and that no doubt the contract would be renewed but there was much apprehension. It was not a very good way to begin a new job.

I immediately began negotiations with Los Angeles and found that the real problem was with the Board of Education there. They had plenty of space available in East Los Angeles and in the San Fernando Valley but were short of space in West Los Angeles where Santa Monica had been serving their students. A couple of Board Members had discovered the unused spaces and decided to make a political fuss about it. After a few meetings the contract was renewed and the threat was ended, temporarily. We all knew that Los Angeles Board could hold a threat of cancellation over our heads and really cause serious problems.

I knew that as long as we served Los Angeles students on a tuition basis, we could be threatened with contract cancellation. In California, the community colleges are a part of the State College system and are subsidized by the State. I concluded that if we could get some new buildings on campus, financed by the state,