Irvine Valley College’s Child Development Center targeted for closure

     Administration at Irvine Valley College is once again scrambling to deal with yet another budget shortfall, and it's pretty serious. The IVC Academic Senate, which represents faculty on academic matters, has attempted to monitor the situation, but, as usual, neither President Glenn Roquemore nor his VP of College Administrative Services, Davit Khachatryan, seem capable of providing clear or coherent budget information. It's an old complaint.
     Natch, college personnel have been looking for ways to save big money.
     As you may know, many college programs offer courses with lab time, and these labs are generally money-losers, a state of affairs tolerated owing to the necessity of the labs for the viability of the programs.
     The Human Development program has a lab, too. It is the Child Development Center (CDC), situated at the east corner of campus, where, for many years, children have been provided day care and instruction. Owing to recent increases in salaries (secured by our faculty union), the cost of maintaining staff at the CDC has gone up, and, for that reason among others, the center now operates in the red. We keep hearing deficit figures between $400k and beyond.
     Evidently, our VP of Student Services, Linda Fontanilla, has, in recent weeks, been making the rounds presenting a very dismal picture of the CDC, saying (as I understand it) that few HD students do lab work at the center, that the CDC attracts few clients (children), and so on. She's obviously making the case that the CDC should be shut down.

Fontanilla

     We at the Academic Senate have just learned that some committee (not sure which, but the usual suspects) is already recommending pulling the plug on the CDC as a way to help address the budget shortfall. As a result of that decision, there is an item on the agenda of the next board meeting requesting the the college may be allowed to move in that direction.
     Following a now familiar pattern, administration seems to be making decisions sans the defined process, which is designed to solicit input from various governance groups (including the Academic Senate).
     According to HD faculty, who attended Thursday’s Senate meeting, the first they heard about this move to close CDC was a week earlier. They were horrified. Now, they've got only a few days to scare up ideas to save the center.

     At the meeting, two HR faculty complained that the current process, whatever it is, has proceeded without any effort to consult or inform the affected faculty, who were taken utterly by surprise. Why was there no effort to reconfigure the CDC to make it operate more cheaply?, they asked. Why not ask for our help and resources? Why are we moving straight to closing down the CDC?
     At the meeting, HD faculty asserted that their programs are dependent on the operation of the CDC and that, therefore, the college's plug-pulling of CDC would be a de facto plug-pulling of their programs. Further, they claimed that the alleged factoids promulgated by the VPSS are erroneous or distorted—that, for instance, the related programs do indeed seek to maximize the number of HD students instructed at the CDC but that efforts in this regard are constrained by the limited number of classes that can be offered there.

     Khachatryan was present to answer questions, but that didn’t go far. He suggested that, when it comes to the “academic side of things,” we need to talk to the VP of Instruction, Chris McDonald.
     Natch, he wasn’t present.
     The senators heard all this and were sympathetic. The senate will try to insure that the college's governance procedures are followed. That means that no decision to close CDC can have been made at this point and that this matter must wend through the prescribed process, involving various committees and other entities.
     That's our thinking, anyway.
     Stay tuned.