Fine Against Community College District Lifted

LOS ANGELES — Touting a bit of good news in what has otherwise been a bleak financial period, officials with the Los Angeles Community College District said Tuesday that an unprecedented $2.8-million fine imposed on the district last year has been lifted.

State regulators agreed not to impose the fine for having too few full-time faculty members after the district successfully argued that it was based on faulty figures, said Blair Sillers, assistant to Los Angeles District Chancellor James Heinselman.

State officials had said the district had fallen a few percentage points below the state goal of maintaining 75% of its instructors as full-time faculty, Sillers said.

But in negotiations, district officials convinced them that some full-time faculty members had been wrongly classified as part-time--in some cases because they had been teaching extra classes on a part-time basis. “We reached a meeting of the minds,” Sillers said. “We are obviously better off for this.”

The reprieve further brightens the district’s slowly improving financial picture, Sillers said. In contrast to last year, when the district faced a $13.1-million shortfall, the current year’s $290-million operating budget is balanced, although “it’s sort of a rocky boat,” Sillers said.