rich 1.0 Action Network https://actionnetwork.org <link href='https://actionnetwork.org/css/style-embed-v3.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' /><script src='https://actionnetwork.org/widgets/v6/letter/supervisors-haney-and-walton-stand-up-for-ccsfs-students?format=js&source=widget'></script><div id='can-letter-area-supervisors-haney-and-walton-stand-up-for-ccsfs-students' style='width: 100%'><!-- this div is the target for our HTML insertion --></div> AFT 2121 https://actionnetwork.org/groups/aft-2121 https://actionnetwork.org//images/generic_facebook.jpg I’m writing in support of CCSF, because our college needs you to vote yes on expanding the Workforce Education Recovery Fund (WERF) to prevent massive cuts to CCSF. CCSF is a majority student of color bedrock of San Francisco. It’s free for local residents, and it’s the single largest job/skills trainer in the city. It’s where San Francisco’s nurses, firefighters, mechanics, and changemakers come from. CCSF is a crucial part of how our city can recover from COVID-19. But right now, our College is facing the layoff of over 65% of its faculty. Philippine Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Aircraft Maintenance, Fashion, and Dance are facing total elimination. Workforce programs like nursing, culinary arts, automotive and computer science are facing major cuts. English as a Second Language is facing an over 50% cut. The college may be cut in half, leaving more than 600 faculty without work and more than 30,000 students without educational opportunities during a pandemic. We need you to vote yes on WERF expansion so that City College can continue to meet the needs of our City. The college has already lost 20% of its classes in the last two years and can no longer meet the enrollment demand in San Francisco. The college’s budget crisis means that fully enrolled classes are being cut. The attack on the college’s accreditation in 2012 led to falling enrollment, but just as the college started to recover, deep cuts to well-enrolled classes and programs led to fewer students being able to register. Our state’s public education system is chronically underfunded, depriving communities of educational and job training opportunities, driving more students into private institutions and student debt. City College provides San Franciscans with a wider breadth of programs than most community colleges around the state, but the funding the state provides is far less than what the college needs in order to meet San Francisco’s needs. The state is pushing CCSF admin to “rightsize” our CCSF but we know that a smaller college will not meet the demand for classes and programs from thousands of majority students of color on waiting lists for the programs they need or struggling to graduate because of class cuts. The Higher Education Emergency Recovery Fund (HEERF I, II, III) is federal emergency funding that has been provided to City College for institutional use. This funding can be used for things like the registration system, educational support systems, website improvements and for direct payments to students as incentives to take full-time classes or to assist with things like food, housing, transportation to alleviate barriers to continuing educational plans. HEERF funds may not be used to cover costs that are not a direct result of COVID or the transition to temporary distance education, such as covering existing payroll, marketing or consultants. So, while these funds will help support students and will have some impact on CCSF’s budget deficit, they are not enough on their own to stop the cuts to our programs and the layoffs of faculty. You can not let your legacy as a leader on the Board of Supervisors during covid recovery be allowing tens of thousands of students to be permanently pushed out of educational opportunities and job training while we try to recover from a global pandemic. These cuts will only beget further and future cuts to programs our community needs. We need you to lead on this issue so that we can find long term solutions to the challenges faced by the college. I know the value of CCSF firsthand, I’ve felt it, San Franciscans know it, so I’m writing to urge you to vote yes on WERF expansion to help offset the effect of these devastating cuts to the City College of San Francisco. https://actionnetwork.org/letters/supervisors-haney-and-walton-stand-up-for-ccsfs-students