Aaron Klein's Corner

A new blog I'm reading...

The main rule? Every post is 22 words or less.

www.TwentyTwoWords.com

It's up for a Bloggie award, too...

Bill Leonard on Community Colleges

One of my favorite leaders in California is our Board of Equalization Member, Bill Leonard. Bill has a common sense outlook on our state's fiscal situation, and I've yet to strongly disagree with any of his ideas.

In his weekly newsletter this morning, he just took on community college funding, and I couldn't agree with him more. The mission of our community college system doesn't match its funding — one or the other has to change!

I also had some feedback on community colleges this week and join my correspondents’ concerns about this backbone of our state’s education system.  The state requires community colleges to be open to all comers, and this is one of the best features of community colleges.  Everyone can walk in the door and begin taking classes to improve their skills, learn a trade, or work toward a degree. 

However, the state does a disgraceful job of funding community colleges or making sure that students can transfer easily to a CSU or UC.  The state projects what enrollment growth will be at the community colleges and then gives them that amount of money, regardless of what actual enrollment is.  One community college I know of grew by 19% but only received funding for 3% growth.  Now, consider what is going to happen to community college enrollment since CSU and UC will be restricting their number of students because of budget problems.  Add to that the increase in new and returning students because of the economic decline, and we have a huge problem brewing. 

CSU and UC have little incentive to take transfer units since the fewer units students transfer in with, the more they will pay in tuition to take the classes on their campuses.  While many community colleges coordinate transfer units with the closest CSU/UC, these agreements do not extend to campuses around the state.  Seems silly to me because calculus is calculus whether you take it in Rancho Cucamonga or San Diego. 

Our community college system deserves much better than it gets.   We ask it to do tremendous work remediating students who did not understand high school topics, teaching English to immigrants, covering hobbies for seniors, enhancing learning for advanced high school students, training for careers like nursing, radiology, mechanics, etc.  We tell them they have to do this for anyone and everyone who applies, and the state is better off for it.  In these tough times when the community colleges will be asked to do even more, we should rethink how we prioritize high education funding and put more of a spotlight on our community college system.

Spencer and Choo-Choos

Cacey posted this photo documenting Spencer's absolute obsession with choo-choos. Here he is, wearing his Thomas the Train pajamas, with his train set ready to go, looking through a catalog of...train sets.

 

Looking more like a two year old every day...

Senator Sam to become Lt. Governor Sam?

Word is that one of my favorite State Senators, Sam Aanestad, is considering a run for Lieutenant Governor. Sam is one of the most dedicated and hard-working public servants that I know, and he has always conducted himself with the utmost integrity. I hope he runs — count me in if he does!

Another of those "how did I ever live without it" technologies

I had to do a quick post on one of my favorite and most useful tools. It's so great -- I barely think about the fact that it's there, until all of a sudden, I need it.

I'm talking about a service called SugarSync. I stumbled upon it when I decided I should get serious about backing up my files. It sits in the background and uploads any files I change over the Internet to my secure backup account. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. SugarSync also...

• Lets me sync folders (for example, my iTunes Music folder) between multiple computers
• Lets me easily access files from my other computer
• Lets me log in over the web to access a file from any computer in the world
• Lets me log in over my BlackBerry to select and e-mail a file to anyone
• Lets me send big files as a downloadable link, rather than an attachment that bounces or gets stuck in my outbox
• And a new feature I haven't even tried will let me share entire folders with other people

All this, and the pricing is amazing. 10GB is just $2.50 a month; 20GB (they've upped it to 30GB, and kept the price the same) is $4.95 a month. And I never have to worry about losing a file, or not having access to the files I need on the right computer!

Sorry, just had to share that. No, I didn't do it just for a free t-shirt. It really is one of the coolest things I've run across in a while, and you won't know how you lived without it after you get it.

Sierra College to Save the Day for Students and Advance Cal Grant Funding

I'm extraordinarily proud of the decision by Sierra College President Leo Chavez to advance Cal Grant funding to our students. This critical financial aid, that students use to pay tuition and buy books, flows through us from the State of California, but with the state budget crisis, the state is sending students IOUs instead. Try buying your books with one of those!

Knowing full well that his Board would be highly supportive, Leo stepped up and made the commitment to advance this funding to students, and worked with the Sierra College Foundation to secure backup funding in the relatively unlikely case that the state doesn't eventually reimburse the IOUs.

Bravo to the Sierra College team...it's called putting students first, and it's exactly what we do.

Cal Grants are funded by the state and provide free money to high school graduates who meet academic, financial and eligibility requirements to cover college-related expenses.

Upon hearing that the state budget crises could mean the state controller’s office would issue IOUs instead of checks for grant recipients starting Feb. 1, Sierra College officials made a quick decision.

Leo Chavez, College superintendent/president, and the Sierra College Foundation agreed to fund the grants this semester. The grants help close to 1,000 students and in total will cost about $394,000 to cover this semester.

Chavez said the school is essentially advancing the money in hopes that the state will come through with the payments later.

» Read the Complete Article

Welcome to Sierra College Police Chief Greg Murphy

It was a great honor to welcome law enforcement veteran Greg Murphy to the Sierra College family as our new Police Chief. He was sworn in by our great Placer County Sheriff, Ed Bonner, at our last board meeting.

For the last four years, I have been a strong supporter of arming our Sierra College police officers. College campuses, like Virginia Tech, are often targets in this day and age. This change at the college is one of the steps toward POST certification and arming our officers, which the Board of Trustees finally voted to set into motion last year.

I am grateful to our staff that we didn't have to wait for an "incident" at our college to make this policy decision. It's an example of proactive decision making, and it was the right thing to do.

Welcome, Chief Murphy!

 
Photo Credit: Sierra College PIO 

» Read the Complete Article

Enrollment up, up, up...funding down, down, down

Whew, life is busy right now. Got a few great news pieces to post, and they will roll out over the next day or two. Sorry for the delay.

(Also, gotta get aaronklein.com humming again. The home page will soon have a live feed from the blog, some new thoughts on the budget, etc. Just need a few spare minutes!)

Here's the first news piece...an article from one of the AJ's crack reporters, Loryll Nicolaisen, on the dwindling job market upping our enrollments at Sierra College. Meanwhile, our funding can't possibly keep up because of the fact that folks pay less taxes when there is a dwindling job market (can't blame the taxpayers for that!) and the state's chronic overspending.

Lots of hard work ahead as our fiscal picture comes into focus...but I'm confident we've got the right team at Sierra College to emerge as a stronger institution.

 
Sasha Warren speaks to a full house Monday afternoon, the first day of Sierra College spring semester classes. When asked how many students were attempting to add her microbiology course, roughly a quarter of the students sitting in the lecture hall raised their hands. (Photo Credit: Auburn Journal)

Dwindling job market ups enrollment

ROCKLIN — Finding a place to sit at Sierra College Monday was a bit of a challenge.

The first day of the spring semester saw more students attending, and attempting to attend classes than the start of the spring 2008 semester.

Dinielle Nunez, sitting outside after she was finished for the day Monday afternoon, said the scene was pretty similar in all her classes.

First stop Monday morning was anthropology, where class was “completely full” with a lot of overflow, said Nunez, a full-time student from Roseville. Her communication studies class was more of the same. Even aerobics was full. The calculus class Nunez starts Tuesday has been full for a while now, “so I’m guessing a lot of people are trying to add,” she said.

Enrollment is definitely up from last year.

“The number is somewhere between 6 and 8 percent more,” said Dr. Leo Chavez, president of the Sierra Joint Community College District.

» Read the Entire Article

Catching Up

Hey, blog friends...sorry for the long delay between posts. I'm sure it won't be the last time. I just got back from a week and a half of vacation to Seattle, Chicago and Indiana. Cacey, Spencer and I had a great time visiting Pike Place Market, the first-ever Starbucks, Giordano's deep dish pizza, the Sears Tower Skydeck, De Brand Chocolate, and visiting with family near Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Now I'm back, attacking the hundreds of e-mails in the inbox, and we had a board meeting last night as well. I'll try and post a bit more about that soon...we had a very interesting dialogue with the Omniparty, which is the bargaining group for our unions. The state budget issue seems to be mired in gridlock (what's new), but Sierra College is really rising to the occasion in an incredible way -- more on that soon.

The documents from last night's meeting are now posted in Your College @ Work. Have a great week, and I'll post more soon!

PS: I'm on Twitter now. One description for it is a "micro-blog" because each post is 140 characters max. Still sort of figuring this out, but I have it working on the BlackBerry. If you're interested, you can check it out here.

What we do when Mommy is at a brunch...

We watch movies at Dad's office on Dad's iPod, of course. :)