February/March xx, 2018
Dear Senator/Member of the Assembly ______,
I am a faculty member at ______Community College and I write to bring a new idea to your budget deliberations regarding the funding of community colleges. The Faculty Council of Community Colleges, SUNY, the Community College presidents and local trustees all support a redesigned funding formula for our community colleges. We askyou to supportan additional $24 million in funding to hold each campus harmless and ensure that NO campus receives a cut in next year’s budget. Our current enrollment-driven model of funding (FTE) no longer provides the stability in funding that community college students need. While our enrollment has declined at most campuses, personnel costs and the need to provide academic support to our students have not been dramatically reduced.
SUNY’s community colleges provide high-quality higher education, a foundation for transfer to baccalaureate programs and workforce development, all under one local roof. We accomplish these varied goals while working to lessen the burden placed on both students and counties, who have borne the majority of the colleges’ growing fixed costs over the past several years.
As a faculty member, I am aware of the incredible needs of our diverse community college student body at SUNY. We support various learning abilities as well as ethnic, racial, religious and gender identity differences in every classroom. Community college faculty care about our students’ academic success and find that our resources are not always able to meet the academic needs and educational paths that our students require. As education becomes more important and more expensive in our highly technological economy, we find our state funding is still at 2009-2010 FTE funding levels. Currently, the state contributes only half of the per pupil costs to our community colleges that are provided to K-12 institutions and SUNY state-operated campuses.
I, therefore, ask you to support stable base aid as the most important request for community college campuses.
I also ask you to restore $1.1 million in funding for 28 community college child care centers that was cut from the Executive budget. Child care centers support our adult students in their quest to attend college and they also serve as field work placementsites for students in our Early Childhood Education curricula.
Resolutions which support the requests mentioned above are attached and they have been passed by the Faculty Council of Community Colleges (as well as on my campus).
Thank-you for your time and continued support of SUNY’s community colleges.
Sincerely,