THE WINTER quarter enrollment in Georgia’s technical colleges was up 9.4 percent. There are now 88,294 students enrolled in what amounts to workforce training. At Coosa Valley Technical College in Rome, the jump was 12 percent.
That’s hardly surprising in the current economic times and it is commendable that not only young people right out of high school but also older Georgians, most recently in a dwindling job market, are choosing to enhance skills, or find new ones, in order to improve their employment opportunities and options.
This dedication to improving themselves, and grasping the realities of the day, is unfortunately not matched in the Georgia House where, frankly, those supposedly working in the state’s best interests increasingly seem ill-suited to the task.
No further proof is needed than seeing what the House views as important in the face of this 9 percent enrollment leap that comes at exactly the same moment that a projected 8 percent budget slash has been imposed on those same colleges.
To deal with this, the tech colleges have made any number of cost-cutting adjustments including, in the case of CVTC, a “furlough” of all staff (and attendant salary reduction) by closing its campuses for six extra days during the first six months of 2009. The approach taken, and very much the correct one, is to keep the classrooms going and serving the swelling tide of students.
ALONG THE SAME lines, the governing authority of the Technical College System of Georgia decided to merge/combine 13 of its 33 colleges, as it currently has full power to do, in order to save an estimated $3.5 million through the cost savings of efficiency and consolidating administrative positions while retaining all its campuses. This included folding together CTVC and Northwestern Technical College in Rock Spring to create Georgia Northwestern Technical College.
Again, the objective was to protect and maintain what’s most important: the classrooms.
Instead of cheering on this pro-active approach in difficult times, by a near-unanimous (158 to 1) vote the House passed a bill to, of all things, strip the state-appointed board of its power to create, consolidate or close down any of its 33 schools without legislative permission.
Incredibly, every legislator from both political parties from this region supported this power grab and reversal although fully aware of how much good these colleges have done, are doing in a time when they have become even more valuable.
Shockingly, Rep. Katie Dempsey, R-Rome, was among them even though recently named to chair the House subcommittee that oversees the Technical College System of Georgia. Ms. Dempsey knows better and should have thrown her body in front of this freight train but, alas, often appears more ready to talk a good fight than wage one. Also, as a deputy whip, she is clearly in the hip pocket of the House leadership.
WHAT ON EARTH could have motivated the House? Does it have some better way planned to rescue technical education from its current starvation diet? Perhaps, knowing that the state is going to “save” an estimated $100 million in money set aside for elementary/secondary education because of a rather sharp statewide enrollment decline, it plans on diverting those sums not to pork and bacon but rather to the technical colleges and the university system, which is in similar pain.
Would that were the case, but rather it is plain that the fragile, overblown egos of politicians was the cause. How dare a state board with the authority to make decisions not ask the permission of hometown legislators first? Don’t they know where God’s throne is located? Can’t they see the Capitol Dome is paved with gold, just like heaven?
Perhaps etiquette and protocol might have been better handled by the board but wasn’t this, after all, an attempt to deal with an emergency situation in part created by the state government? In face of an emergency, do firemen have to ask, “Please, can I put out the fire now?”
Didn’t the legislators read the suggestion from the governor’s higher-education study panel that both the technical and university systems might benefit from mergers — including of colleges now under separate authorities? (The House action banned this as well.)
As for the plaint that “a lot of the communities were not for this” — huh? Greater Rome’s highly visible and successful technical college, originally launched by Floyd County initiative and not some state brainchild, was a part of this and nary a discouraging word was heard in these parts.
THIS IS ANOTHER core example of why the General Assembly has become dysfunctional, although friends of education should hope the usually wiser heads in the Senate will stop this latest runaway freight load of ego. More and more, the legislature seems to have forgotten its function, which the setting of policies and budgets. It is not, as in this case, the hands-on operation of some department or division of government.
Oddly, it is mainly the “less government” Republicans afflicted with this. Their inability to delegate and the grabbing of more and more power by their elected officials has become acute.
Technical colleges may become only the latest victim, lining up with transportation/highways, public schools, mental health and more as places where the politicians feel they should decide everything down because they don’t believe they know better — they know they know better.
The technical colleges could provide an additional job-training benefit to Georgia by launching a curriculum in “How to Be a State Elected Official.” The introductory course should be: “Why It’s Smart to Delegate Decisions to the People Trained to Know What They’re Doing.”
|
No Related links found
|
