How to resolve AdBlock issue? CLEARLAKE, Calif. — During its annual visit to Lake County last week, the Yuba Community College Board encountered a room filled with concerned residents — current and former students and faculty, and community members — who came to advocate for preserving and building up the district’s Lake County Campus.
The Nov. 9 meeting was marked by an evening of pointed candor, demands for truthfulness and transparency, and an appeal for partnership.
The Yuba Community College District Board, which governs Yuba Community College and Woodland Community College, annually holds one meeting in Lake County, whose Clearlake campus is aligned with Woodland.
Staff say the Lake County meetings typically tend to be the best attended of the year, and that was the case last Thursday evening, when nearly 100 community leaders, students and staff came to the three-and-a-half-hour-long meeting to voice their concerns about the campus’ future.
The overwhelming majority of the more than two dozen speakers told the board at the over a two-hour public comment period of their growing concerns about how the campus’ staff has been allowed to dwindle, with important positions not replaced, while key services for students like the library and the student center are allocated few resources and the bookstore is now nonexistent, and counseling services have been drastically reduced.
“We have lost so many staff here it’s ridiculous. It’s like a ghost town,” said student and Success Center staffer Laura Jean Bevan.
While some of the campus’ issues were attributed to the ongoing fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, speakers indicated the campus’ challenges predated the pandemic, which has only made things worse with its driving down of enrollment.
One former student said the main campus in Woodland has been suffocating the Clearlake campus. Another pointed to the elimination of the LEARN program, meant to help remedial learners, and a lack of marketing of services and classes as more blows to the campus.
Others asked the board to recognize the campus’ unique community, which meets the needs of its students in a very special way. It’s a place, they said, where students have felt safe and valued.
A speaker shared her journey from being homeless and the victim of domestic violence to studying at the campus, which she said saved her life. Today she’s employed and working at the Hope Center.
At the same time, those who spoke to the board pointed to disparities in resource allocation — while positions are disappearing in Lake County, they are increasing at Woodland Community College’s main campus. However, it also has been reported that the Colusa County center is being starved of resources.
Kevin Reynolds, vice president of Reynolds Systems, which employs 100 people, said one of their biggest challenges is recruiting, and how education can help local businesses stay alive.
One of the former students who spoke, Ami Landrum, said what is being taken away from the campus is detrimental to the whole community.
Still other concerns focused on the campus’ lack of a strategic plan.
These concerns matched what Dr. Shouan Pan, the district’s new chancellor, heard from staff and community leaders at an Oct. 23 listening session also attended by Lake County News.
Afterward, Trustee Doug Harris, a former campus faculty member who now represents Lake County on the board, said he had never seen anything like it, with so many people coming forward to explain, point by point, their concerns.
Just a year ago, at the campus’ 50th anniversary event, staff, students and supporters highlighted how the educational opportunities it has afforded have had an immensely positive impact on the community.
Those raising the alarm to the board last Thursday were united in their concerns that Lake County could end up ultimately losing the campus.
Ed Robey, a former Clearlake City Council member and retired county supervisor who once was an adjunct professor at the college, said the community needs a viable, sustainable community college.
“We’re at a tipping point, and it’s up to you guys to decide which way we tip,” Robey told the board.
Robey was one of several speakers who asked the board to be honest with the community and not let the campus die on the vine.
Clearlake City Manager Alan Flora said they’re seeing the campus be squeezed at every corner.
“The only result that you can expect from that continual squeezing is the concerns that you’re hearing,” Flora said.
Pamela Bening-Hale, a former student at the college who now sits on the Konocti Unified School Board, put it more bluntly.
“Shame on you,” she told the board, adding that she hadn’t realized what was being taken away from Lake County’s students.
Notable speakers make their arguments
Notable among the speakers were the number of former students who have since gone on to become community leaders and professionals, all of them emphasizing the difference their education at the Lake County Campus made.
They included District 2 Supervisor Bruno Sabatier, who also worked as an outreach and engagement specialist at the campus; Zabdy Neria, a Lake County Office of Education child therapist and Konocti Unified School District Board member; Pamela Bening-Hale, who also serves on the Konocti Unified Board; Tim Gill, assistant superintendent of educational services; Kim Cole, tribal administrator for Middletown Rancheria; Randall Cole, Kim Cole’s husband, a counselor and motivational speaker; Clearlake Mayor Russell Perdock; Kevin Thompson, clinic manager at the Lake County Tribal Health Consortium’s new Clearlake clinic; and Rob Reil, who now heads up the Lower Lake High School Culinary Program.
Then there were the former instructors who passionately appealed for help for the school, including Harris, Robey, Shannon Gunier, Dr. Harry Lyons and Peggy Alexander.
Those former students and instructors were joined by Lake County Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg; Clearlake City Councilman Dirk Slooten; Joan Mingori, a business owner and retired Konocti Unified career counselor and board member; and City Manager Alan Flora.
Sabatier, who called the meeting attendance “amazing,” offered statistics outlining the different economic realities for Lake and Yolo counties, explaining that getting people to sign up for college in Woodland and Yolo County may be more natural than in Clearlake and Lake County.
He asked the board to look at expenditures per student, asserting that Lake County’s students should be valued as much as students at other campuses.
Sabatier pointed to the need to pay staff more to retain them, and to keep lines of communication open with local government.
“No longer in Lake County do we say it is what it is or it is good enough,” and that standards need to be raised, expectations set and people held accountable.
“I’m looking for partnership, I’m looking for leadership, I’m looking for us to serve together to make our community a better place,” said Sabatier.
Gunier called her 10 years as an adjunct faculty member “my heart job,” recalling how well people worked together.
She said if you want to see success in action, attend a campus graduation ceremony.
However, Gunier, like other former staff members, said staff is declining, which has been brought on in part by lack of support from the Woodland Community College administration.
“Their efforts seem to be marginal at best,” said Gunier, pointing to lack of a strategic plan and adding, “Our staff has been left out of the decision making process.”
That’s led to important positions being eliminated. When staff raises concerns about that, Gunier said they are being met with a condescending and dismissive attitude.
She blamed it on the campus’ realignment with Woodland in 2015, suggesting the best thing to do is to let Lake County’s campus run autonomously, under the auspices of the California Community Colleges system, or to come up with a shared strategic plan to deal with dropping attendance and loss of staff.
“We have the power to turn it around,” she said.
Falkenberg pointed out that the Yuba Community College District serves all or part of eight counties, a huge geographical area with many diverse and unique needs and desires.
“Clearlake is unique as well,” he said, explaining that fewer than 80% of Clearlake residents have a high school diploma and only 40% have attempted college courses, significantly different statistics from the state, from Woodland and Davis.
One third of Lake County’s workforce leaves the county each day, primarily for Sonoma, Napa and Mendo counties — in that order, Falkenberg said. The majority of those commuters live in the south county, in the college’s district. As a result, connections to the Sacramento Valley, where the main campus is located, is limited.
He asked for leadership focused on Lake County and the Clearlake campus, noting there is a difference between leadership and management, as leadership means engaging with people.
“I ask, I think we all ask, that the college focus on being leaders in Lake County,” Falkenberg said.
Falkenberg also asked for them to come with a can-do attitude to meet the community’s needs, and not expect the community to meet the college’s needs.
Ignoring the needs of the living — and the dead
Dr. Lyons, who taught biology at the campus for 29 years before his 2016 retirement, said he keeps track of his colleagues, and he now sees signs of unsustainability. He pointed to the campus library being mostly closed, a nonexistent bookstore, and a computer lab where the lights are off and students have no access.
In 2016, there were 11 full-time faculty at the Lake County Campus; now there are six. At the same time, the main Woodland Campus’ staff has grown from 27 to 37, a 37% increase compared to Lake County’s 45% decrease, Lyons said.
Lyons said that, as a scientist, “data without context is troublesome,” explaining that even with COVID-19 and the impact on Lake County of damaging wildfires, the Lake County Campus’ experience is still substantially different from Woodland’s.
He said Lake is the ninth poorest county in California. “Poverty is nothing to be proud of but it is nothing to be ashamed of either,” he said, pointing out that none of the seven other counties the district serves are on that list of the poorest counties.
Lyons also asked them to get a full-time biology instructor, explaining that there are ethical and biological requirements for the management of the cadavers that the campus uses in its biological studies.
He had worked to bring cadavers — and the learning opportunities they offer to students — to the campus. Yet, with no biology professor now in place, there are concerns the cadavers are not being protected and cared for properly.
Peggy Alexander, who retired in 2018 after teaching 28 years, said she watched it grow from a tiny campus to a thriving location at the time she retired.
Alexander said when you take an already lean institution and cut it more, it puts limits on the local administration’s ability.
“You starve the institution. You wrong our campus and our community,” she said, and violate your mission. But, she added, the board has the power to do otherwise.
Slooten, as he had been in the listening session with Dr. Pan weeks earlier, was emphatic about the need to preserve the campus.
“Woodland should not decide what is good for Lake County. Period,” Slooten said.
Too many programs and staff positions have been cut by Woodland, he said. “That has to stop, now.”
The Lake County Campus is vital for providing much-needed programs for economic and personal development, said Slooten, who asked for a commitment from the board that they will pay attention to this campus. “It is that important to us.”
Rob Reil said he felt at home the minute he met Culinary Arts instructor Robert Cabreros, who taught him to be kind to others, to have perspective and to always move forward.
Riel, who now teaches those same skills at Lower Lake High School, said that when his students think about a four year campus, their brains explode, but the Lake County Campus provides them with opportunities.
He advocated for dual enrollment — with high school students able to get college credit. “This is the hill that I will die on.”
Randall Cole called the campus “an artery to our community,” and that taking away its funding is like taking away the runaway from an airplane. “You can’t take off.”
Pointing to the dozens of concerned Lake County residents, Cole added, “Please hear our community. Look at this room.”
Harris got up from his seat at the board table to go to the podium, receiving a round of applause as he did so.
Formerly a faculty member who taught at the campus for 23 years, Harris said, “My observation is that this campus has been subject to an administration by attrition more than anything else.”
He said that process by the Woodland administration began in 2016 with the realignment, “and has been gathering speed ever since.”
They have no counselors, no position covering engagement and recruitment for high school students — which is the biggest component out of community colleges’ recent climb out of enrollment decline — and have had a policy of canceling classes two weeks before the semester, despite the fact that many students add classes at the last minute. He added that he’s pleased to hear that the cancellation policy is being revised.
Harris said the community won’t accept a result with the Lake County Campus similar to what has happened with the Colusa Center. Colusa County educators recently told him, in his capacity as a board member, “We thought you had forgotten us.”
He ended by turning to the audience and said, “Thank you all for showing up.”
A need to focus on local high schools students
Joan Mingori, who had been a career counselor at Lower Lake High School, said that the campus has suffered as the college administration has killed off dual enrollment classes.
She recalled bringing hundreds of students to the college and working with counselors to get them financial aid and to complete enrollment. All of that went away with the student outreach programs.
Mingori questioned how poorer students can manage to study effectively without the library and resource center.
“I’m angry. I’m angry at all of you,” she told the board. She added, “We had a viable campus here and you really have let it go.”
Lake County Chief Deputy Probation Officer Meredith Noyer spoke about an October event in which 40 agencies came to the college campus to offer support to individuals on probation supervision as part of giving them new opportunities. She said those individuals referred by probation felt support and hope.
Flora said the city of Clearlake has been renting a building on campus for their staff as the City Hall renovations move forward.
He said it’s been interesting to be on campus and see what’s going on. “It hasn’t put my mind at ease. It’s made me more concerned.”
Former Campus Dean Ingrid Larsen — who left for another job in September after less than a year in the position — told Flora a few times that it was very sad that the city supports the campus more than the college leadership.
Flora said there is a tremendous amount of need, and the situation boils down to two options: either change course and invest in the campus or be honest with the community that they’re going to squeeze it to death.
Speaking for the city, Flora said, “We’re committed to transforming this community.”
Tim Gill of Konocti Unified spoke about the 10 career pathways at Lower Lake High School, in which are enrolled about 700 students. There’s a total of 1,100 high school students not far away, between Lower Lake and Middletown High schools, but the pathways are meant to take those students elsewhere.
He noted how Lake County Fire Chief Willie Sapeta and Adventist Health Clear Lake President Colleen Assavapisitkul asked to have the college add an emergency response pathway. Woodland Community College said no, Mendocino College said yes.
Gill, who took classes at the campus and had been an adjunct faculty member there, told the board, “You guys need to invest in us.”
Board President Juan Delgado thanked everyone for coming to the meeting. “You are showing that you really are for this facility.”
Later in the meeting, as it was nearing its end, new Trustee Rita Andrews told community members that they were heard, and that she would be thinking about what was said that night for a long time.
Board member Jesse Ortiz said he wanted an analysis of the Lake County Campus and resources and where the college is at in the budget.
“It's only fair. We spent two hours listening to this community,” Ortiz said, asking them to take some time and put it on an upcoming agenda. “I think it’s just the right thing to do.”
Sabatier, sitting in the back of the room, gave the board a thumbs-up.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
