Creative Commons/Marlon E

City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus

The Oakland Unified School District hopes to save $8.8 million next year by laying off 46 adult-education teachers. Most vocational programs would be cut, along with citizenship preparation classes and English as a second language courses. Literacy courses and General Education Development, or GED, classes would be shifted from a separate adult-education program to the district's high schools and College and Career Readiness Office. Board members expect to make a final decision by June 29.

“It is hard to say how many classes we will be able to offer, and how many students will be affected,” said Chris Nelson, assistant director for the Oakland district's Oakland Adult and Career Education, which offers classes to 3,000 students. “If adult education goes away, the students that we have been serving will go underground. If a person is not employable, they become a burden to us as taxpayers. They will either get into the criminal justice system or go on welfare.”

Similarly deep cuts are in store in the San Jose Unified School District. In July, the district intends to shift $3.5 million in state funding away from some adult-education programs to academic support for low-achieving students in grades K-12. As a result, there will no courses for seniors, and classes for students learning English, earning their GED or preparing for a career in nursing or accounting will be significantly reduced.

“It is our core mission to support K-12 education,” said Karen Fuqua, a spokeswoman for the San Jose Unified School District, which serves 32,000 students in grades K-12. “Because of the state’s draconian cuts, we had to find dollars to support core tutorial programs like Saturday classes and summer programs for K-12 students.”

Community colleges are also not immune. City College of San Francisco, for example, is scrambling to offset a cut of at least $8.5 million from the state. As a result, it intends to cut roughly 700 classes over the next school year, many of them for adults. Enrollment in these adult programs — including English as second language and computer classes — will likely grow more competitive.

“We always are deeply concerned for the communities we serve when we are forced to reduce access,” said Peter Goldstein, the college’s vice chancellor of finance and administration. “But the state budget cuts have taken so much money away from our college that we have no choice.”