Senate File 2117 calls for immediately cutting $5.4 million from Iowa's community colleges, when the budget year is more than half over.
What’s the reason businesses aren’t moving to Iowa or expanding in our communities? We don’t have enough skilled workers to do the jobs they need to fill.
Forcing community colleges to drop classes, cut programs, increase tuition and lay off staff will make creating better-paying jobs and boosting economic growth even more difficult.
DMACC and Iowa Valley Community College are involved in so much that is going right in our economy. The colleges, the teachers and especially the students generate and attract economic activity in communities, large and small. We must support them and invest in them, not cut their resources.
Under the Senate proposal, DMACC will have to cut $910,527 from their budget in the next few months. That works out to $227,632 per month from March through the end of the fiscal year on June 30. Iowa Valley will need to cut $241,629, or $60,407 per month. It’s estimated that tuition would have to go up 5 to 10 percent to make up the difference.
These cuts put people’s lives and careers—our whole economy—on hold. For example:
• The DMACC diesel program had 58 students ready to start training for an in-demand field that maintains diesel engines, fixes tractors for farmers and repairs turbines for power plants. Now they can only train 28 students.
• DMACC will have to stop work on a joint Cyber Security program with Iowa State.
• The planned expansion of the Court Reporting program at DMACC will be scrapped.
• Community colleges won’t be able to implement regional Career & Technical Education Centers—joint projects with K-12 schools—throughout the state.
• The Governor just signed into law SF 512, addressing water quality. Community colleges were set to train Iowans for work in this field, but these cuts will prevent them from developing their water-quality programs.
If community colleges matter to you — good course offerings, affordable tuition, great educators and the boost they bring to incomes and our economy — contact your state legislators and encourage them to put community colleges at the top of their priority list.
Sen. Chaz Allen represents much of Jasper and eastern Polk counties.
Contact Allen at 641-521-6297 or chaz.allen@legis.iowa.gov.