The CCSF budget and standing up for the CCSF San Franciscans Deserve

Here we are nearing the end of our first full semester of crisis distance learning, enduring a global pandemic, facing the most critical budget shortfall our college has seen in a decade, and anxiously awaiting a new president. And now we face the failure of Proposition 15 and the COVID impacts on the state economy.

 

Many of you worked overtime to elect candidates and pass public-education-friendly ballot measures. Many of those efforts succeeded. But we still face this challenge as the canary in the mine. Because we resist austerity and dare to serve our whole community, we are among the first to feel the strains of underfunding. This was confirmed last Thursday, when our board of trustees unanimously approved a budget that recommends drastic downsizing of our college.

 

We face a funding crisis, and we need a viable long-term plan and vision. Yet our administration’s budget document is based on magical thinking – that the college can cut 600 sections while maintaining enrollment at current levels. And while planning is important, a long-term budget projection like this is a tool school districts use to justify the deepest possible cuts.

 

A real plan would start from values and priorities. It would name specifically what we must keep in order to serve our community. It would prioritize the cost of classes and the services necessary to continue those classes and then trim as needed. It would position our college as an engine of recovery for San Francisco. It would recognize that we – employees, students, and community – are people, not numbers to be moved around on a page.

 

Administration’s budget document turns our values on their heads. It targets non-credit, although non-credit includes our most vulnerable students. We claim to be a sanctuary college, but cuts to non-credit ESL would simply erase many immigrants from our student body. Who exactly are we a sanctuary for? When will those at the top confront the racism that drives the devaluation of services for these communities of color?

 

Cutting 600 sections would mean eliminating full classes in credit as well. Which students will we turn away? Whose college will this be? Administration can’t explain how they would decide what to cut, beyond assurances that there will be “consultation”. Tom Boegel has no conception of what this budget document would mean for our programs and our students. For all the hours and resources sunk to develop this document, there is no vision.

 

Like so many of administration’s previous budgets, this document does not represent a real plan. We reject it. The work ahead must include a commitment to build revenue, to increase enrollment, to live our values and fulfill our college mission. We will accept nothing less from our college leadership than a vision for our community.

 

AFT 2121 will continue to work to defend the CCSF that San Franciscans deserve. We call on our college administration and board of trustees to join us.