Ventura Unified School District is not alone in its continuing budget crisis. Over the past three years, Ventura County community colleges have had to cut the number of classes offered, class sizes, and the number of hours the schools operate.

Community colleges are funded by the government per each enrolled student, but only up to a certain amount. Once a school exceeds that amount, they receive no additional financial assistance. Over the past three years, Ventura County community colleges had a drop of about $20 million in funds.

Therefore, community colleges everywhere are trying to limit the amount of classes they offer and class sizes in order to match the number of students they are funded for.

“One time we had over 3,000 students that were not funded, so you can’t really run a business like that,” Ventura County Community College District Trustee Stephen Blum said. “It’s like an airline flying passengers for free. You can’t do that for very long.”

The budget cuts are affecting both students and teachers. Some students complain about not being able to find a class because of how quickly they fill up, or not being able to take the classes they want to.

“It’s going to affect me greatly because I am going for my art major in the art department program,” Ventura College student Elijah Tindall said, “Therefore, next year and next semester there are courses that I won’t be able to take as I was going to.”

In terms of jobs being cut, there is a large array of roughly 60 management jobs, most of them classified.  This is a large cut, but with the descending revenue bill, Ventura College sees it as their only option.

“If there was a better solution, we would do that… The real answer is that we don’t have any good options, just crummy ones,” Blum said.

Blum does think this situation is worse than the budget crisis faced by Ventura Unified, and can’t predict what will happen with the budget in the future.

“It’s just a real sad reality. I’m always disturbed that education, fire, and safety are the three people hit. I mean we need our schools, we need our firemen, we need our policemen and it seems there must be somebody else they can pick on,” Foothill Career/Multimedia Specialist Linda Kapala said.

She continued, “But I do think that they’ve been fair in their handling of it and it’s a shame that we’re kind of going a little bit backwards in education. We’re taking away some opportunities instead of expanding them.”