COMMUNITY COLLEGES DESERVE BETTER FUNDING.

Byline: Mark Drummond and Kelly Candaele Local View

WILMA Monroe has never heard of Robert Hertzberg, the newly installed speaker of the California State Assembly. Wilma is a student at Los Angeles Valley College, where this month she will become the first generation in her family to get a college degree.

Hertzberg has begun to chart a vision of his speakership by making California's community colleges a top legislative and economic priority.

Like Wilma, most of the Los Angeles Community College District's 100,000 students do not follow the arcane rules or the day-to-day political dealings of the California Legislature. But if Hertzberg is successful, our current students, as well as the tens of thousands more who will enter one of our nine campuses over the coming years, will benefit from the push to bring California closer to parity with the rest of the nation in funding for community colleges.

Last month, the Assembly Budget Subcommittee requested a $300 million augmentation to Gov. Gray Davis' proposed 2000-2001 budget. If Davis agrees to this budget revision, he will be taking the first step toward closing the $2,500-per-student funding gap that separates California community colleges from similar colleges in other states.

While California spends about $3,900 per community college student, the national average is $6,500. In comparison, the University of California receives $17,000 per student from California taxpayers.

While California invents the new technology, other states invest the money it takes to make sure that their high school and community college students have access to it.

The Assembly's proposed additional funding is targeted for 60,000 more students - 6,000 additional students in the Los Angeles Community College District alone. The critical areas of funding are for transfer studies, training and technology modernization.

If accepted by the governor, the funding will let us enhance our training for employment in nursing, computer programming, entertainment technology and other high-tech jobs of the future.

Additional Partnership for Excellence funds will allow us to hire academic counselors and financial-aid officers to help us keep students in school and raise transfer rates to four-year universities, areas where dramatic improvements are essential.

Hertzberg has called our community colleges the ``colleges of the new economy.'' He has seen the future, and it points right at our institutions.

California community colleges provide a quality education to a student population nearly three times the combined size of the student population in the California State University and University of California systems.

Eighty-four percent of all Latinos in college attend community colleges. In the Los Angeles district alone, three times more African-American students and two times more Latinos are educated at community colleges than at all the University of California campuses combined.

A recent poll conducted under the auspices of the district indicates that more than 90 percent of the public believes that community colleges are an indispensable public resource and that they enhance the quality of life in their communities. Most who were polled also feel that the community colleges are in need of additional funding for facilities, more instructors and technology modernization.

In the Los Angeles Community College District, we've made dramatic reforms to better serve our community and students.

We have eliminated a $14 million deficit. We have shifted the decision- making from a central district office to each of our nine colleges. We have added curriculum flexibility to offer classes for our students when they are available to learn. Finally, we have brought in experienced new leadership at our district and college level.

If Gov. Davis augments his proposed budget, as the Assembly is asking him to do, the impact on the nine colleges of the Los Angeles Community College District will be enormous.

The district would receive approximately $40 million, and we would be able to educate an additional 6,000 students - an increase equivalent to one-third of the students on a University of California campus.

We have an opportunity to make a major difference in the future of this city. Our community colleges will be the ladder of upward mobility and access to higher education for a large portion of our population. The California State Assembly, Senate and governor can help provide our students with high-quality instruction, technology and facilities. Students like Wilma Monroe will do the rest.