CSUS students lobby budget summit

Merrill Balassone

May 2, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- TURLOCK -- Two CSUS freshmen mixed puff paint with a cause Thursday at a university budget summit.

They wore hand-painted red tank tops that read: "You cut our classes. You cut our education." (They made sure to include a shout-out to their English professor, too.) Laura Delano and Amy Yingst also helped create a Facebook.com page, "Save our Classes," that has 410 members.

"We won't be able to take those classes or graduate on time or do what we want in the future," said Delano, who hopes to go to medical school.

Faced with a $6.2 million shortfall, the university has cut half of its summer school classes. Professors and university staff at the summit urged students to lobby administrators to keep classes intact for this fall.

"You're paying more and more and more for your education and getting less and less and less," professors union President John Sarraille told the students. "You're going to be just a cupcake on an assembly line."

About 80 students, professors and staff attended the forum on the state budget crisis and its effect on California State University, Stanislaus. The event was sponsored by the local California Faculty Association chapter, which represents CSUS professors.

California State University Employees Union chapter President Frank Borrelli, who helps represent 350 custodians, lab assistants and many other campus staffers, said the facilities department has proposed moving the three remaining groundskeepers from the main campus to the student recreation center. That would remove their salaries from the university's general fund but would leave the campus with no groundskeepers, Borrelli said.

When Borrelli started working at CSUS in 1987, there were 17 groundskeepers.

"This proposal would leave the campus parklike setting we currently struggle to maintain looking like a dump site and the bathrooms looking like service stations," Borrelli said.

The majority of an 11-person university budget committee sent a recommendation to President Hamid Shirvani on April 17 to roll over $1 million of the $6.2 million deficit to the 2010-11 school year. About $1.5 million of next year's anticipated budget debt was a carryover from 2007-08.

Steven Filling, with the professors union, said there have been no answers from administrators of how the university got that far into the hole.

"We can't afford to eat last year's shortfall," he said.

Shirvani will issue a final budget decision this month after consulting with campus groups.

The Turlock campus made $5.4 million in one-time cuts from its $92 million budget this year.

Officials sidestepped cuts to the spring class schedule and faculty and staff positions by using funding from a deal they struck with wireless Internet provider Clearwire Corp. (NASDAQ:CLWR) to lease the campus's unused radio spectrum.

The deal will bring in $4 million this year and as much as $54 million over 30 years.

But while the campus groups continue to wrestle over next year's budget, Delano has a plan in place.

Stay tuned for her YouTube video.

Bee staff writer Merrill Balassone can be reached at mbalassone@modbee.com or 578-2337.

Newstex ID: 34608015