Copyright© 2007 by School Services of California, Inc.

                                      Volume 20                   For Publication Date: February 2, 2007             No. 3

Community College Initiative:
Proposition 98 and Declining Enrollment 

Advocates for community colleges have circulated an initiative, the “Community College Governance, Funding Stabilization, and Student Fee Reduction Act,” intended for the 2008 election ballot. This initiative would enact a number of changes to the Constitution. Of particular interest to the K-12 community, it would: 

·                    Allocate 10.46% of the Proposition 98 funding provided within the Maintenance Factor to community colleges. Community college advocates insist that community colleges should have received 11% of Proposition 98 funding each year since its inception, but that benchmark has only been reached twice—one of which is reflected in the Governor’s Budget Proposal for 2007-08. 

·                    Calculate community college funding separately from that of K-12 education by using factors specifically related to community college workload—such as changes in adult population and changes in unemployment rates—rather than the K-12 enrollment factor currently used in Proposition 98 calculations. 

·                    Change the declining enrollment cushion to a three-year ratcheting down of revenues rather than one year. For many years, community colleges had this three-year cushion. AB 1266 (Chapter 573/2003), a budget trailer bill for that year, changed the three-year to a one-year cushion in order to commensurate with the impact of declining enrollment on revenues for K-12 districts. 

About 900,000 signatures are being submitted for validation; 598,105 must be deemed valid in order to qualify the initiative for the ballot. 

At this point, it is not clear whether these changes will increase funding for the community colleges at the expense of K-12 educator’s share or whether the changes will provide more funding from the non-Proposition 98 portion of the State Budget, thereby leaving the K-12 funding unchanged. Given the uncertainty of state revenues and demographic shifts, these projections will be particularly difficult to make. 

—Robert Miyashiro, Jamillah Moore, Ed.D., and Sheila Vickers