CHANCELLOR: ANSWERS NEEDED FOR GROWING COLLEGE PROBLEMS.

Byline: Lisa M. Sodders Staff Writer

California is failing its young students, and officials across the education system need to band together and cut red tape to correct the problem, the chancellor of the state's largest community college system said Thursday.

Mark Drummond, head of the Los Angeles Community College District, said ``big bureaucracies and a bunch of rules'' are stifling efforts to improve the learning environment amid shrinking budgets.

``We need more dotted lines than solid ones,'' said Drummond, calling on state teachers and administrators to reach beyond their own management structures to embrace change.

Drummond addressed a breakfast meeting Thursday at the California Club downtown, sponsored by the public-relations firm Fleishman-Hillard. The LACCD is paying the firm nearly $400,000 for public-relations advice on how to tell the public how the $2 billion from Proposition A/AA bond issues is being spent. The LACCD recently renewed its contract with the firm to pay it out of bond proceeds.

While admitting that the LACCD had its own bureaucratic problems to resolve, Drummond said educators have to stop pointing fingers and start defining the problems and creating solutions.

He pointed to a successful 3-year-old program that has paired Los Angeles Valley College instructors with 24 high school students at John Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley.

Instructors mentored the students in an intensive college-prep program that included students taking college courses at LAVC. The result: Every student involved moved on to a college, including Stanford and the California Institute of Technology.

Drummond said the high school exit exam helped make high school diplomas ``mean something,'' but he said the exam alone is not an answer to the problems surrounding teen education.

``An 18-year-old who flunks the exit exam isn't going to say, 'I think I'll go retake 10 grade 20 times,' he's going to come to the community colleges,'' Drummond said. He added that nearly half the students who enroll at community colleges are not prepared to do college-level math and English.

Money alone won't solve the state's education woes, but underfunding exacerbates the problem, he said. As tuition and competition grow in the University of California and California State University systems, community colleges are being swamped with students - but there simply aren't enough instructors.

Because of state budget cuts, the nine LACCD campuses have slashed 25 percent of courses, fired about 400 part-time instructors and serve about 20,000 fewer students than they did in 2001, Drummond said.

``We're turning students away who have no other alternative,'' Drummond said.

Lisa M. Sodders, [phone]

lisa.sodders(at)dailynews.com