Free City Funding Chopped in Half: Students Left to Question Their Fate Under Lurie’s Reign

 

 

By John R. Adkins
jradproduction@gmail.com

 

Malaya Redondiez, a 20-year-old student at City College, says she would not be here without Free City.

Redondiez is in her third year at the college, where she volunteers as a peer educator for Project Survive, teaching a curriculum in domestic violence and abuse prevention.

“City College reaches so many places in this country … A blow to City College is an overall blow to the education system here in America,” Redondiez said.

Mayor London Breed’s latest budget proposal threatens to remove funding for Free City for an unknown percentage of City College students.

Most of the city’s previously agreed-upon funding for the Free City program is being appropriated into other areas to address the $789 million deficit.

During his campaign, mayor-elect Daniel Lurie expressed a desire to increase the college’s enrollment and advocate for additional funding. However, he has provided little in the way of a direct response to the reduction of Free City funding.

“You will not find any other college in this city where the majority of students are working-class, low-income or migrant students. I’ve talked to many students from the Philippines who say they specifically immigrated here for the Free City program,” Redondiez said.

Redondiez, the daughter of Filipino immigrants, grew up next door to the City College main campus in the Excelsior neighborhood. Redondiez’s mother immigrated to America at age 11 to escape the martial law implemented in the Philippines in the 1970s and went on to work in the Board of Supervisors office for District 11.

“Is my education not worth funding just because I’m not on a specific educational track?” Redondiez asked.

When Board of Trustees president Alan Wong sat down at Mayor London Breed’s desk with the newly appointed Interim Chancellor Mitchell Bailey, they were there for what they thought would be a straightforward meeting to introduce the new chancellor. It was a calm, clear day in June after the spring semester had ended, and it was sprung on the college representatives that the mayor’s office intended to drastically reduce contributions to the Free City program.

The $18.9 million the program had received the previous year? That has been cut in half. The second year out, it would be reduced even more. Alan Wong, a former City College student who personally drafted the Free City legislation while working as an aide to Supervisor Gordon Mar, was in shock.

“I thought the program was untouchable. We had a 10-year contract that we had signed that specifies how much funding the program should get,” recalled Wong.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) secured $15 million for the program for 2019-20, with gradual annual increases based on inflation until 2029. Financing is provided by the city’s real estate tax on property transfers north of $5 million. San Francisco, the city with a history of having the highest income per capita, had pulled off the first tuition-free community college program in the nation.

“Why would you want to do this? This is an agreement we had, and you guys signed off on it,” Wong pressed, informing the mayor’s office the college community would not be happy. The response he was dished out at the time was that the situation had changed, and if the college disagreed, then they could have a “public conversation” about the merits of the program.
The reasoning behind the proposed cuts to the program has two components: The college was informed that it had been overfunded, leaving tens of millions of dollars in free tuition funds untouched over the last five years. 

“What the city was doing, in essence, was recalibrating based upon prior spending,” Bailey said. “Luckily, we still have access to two years of unspent funds, so even though our allocation this year is $9.3 million, we still have access to over $10 million of unspent funds from prior years, so if we need those monies, we’re going to tap into them, and there’s still a reserve we can tap into should that need arise,” he added.

The second component, as outlined in the city’s new budget, is that as early as 2025, “only certain courses will be eligible for free enrollment, including those that contribute to the fulfillment of student educational plans.”

“They didn’t provide specifics on that component. I’m not even sure they know what they want to pose. To be honest, I think they just have this idea in their head that we shouldn’t cover all the classes and that we’ll figure it out,” Wong said.

 

Who Gets to Take Classes?

 

“Oftentimes students who complete educational programs do so until their bodies and mental health are completely beat down for a promise of a future and a better life with their community,” Redondiez explained.

 “One of the reasons I came to City College was to start the first Anakbyan chapter at this school. I’m organizing groups, and I’m working in the Queer Resource Center. I’m already making contributions to my community,” Redondiez said.

 

The theories being floated around campus are that the progressive tuition waivers would either be reduced to exclusively cover specific degree programs, or they would only go to students who financially need it most. Either way it would be up to the college to decide how to implement a selection process. A system that would divide the student body into two camps: those who are supported, and those who aren’t.

“Imagine adding this additional layer of only certain kinds of programs or services being eligible based on an education plan,” said Lisa Cooper Wilkins, vice chancellor of student affairs and member of the Free City Oversight Committee.

“It would administratively be a challenge to implement in a really short amount of time. It could cost a lot of money and a lot of energy,” Wilkins said.

Alisa Messer, an English professor at City College and active member of the teacher’s union American Federation of Teachers 2121, also spoke to the complicated nature of filtering students by eligibility. Through her activism in the teacher’s union over the years, she became deeply involved in the inception of the Free City program.

“You might have someone who could afford to go to college, but thinks, maybe it’s not going to work out, so they don’t take the risk. Or you might have somebody who can’t afford to go to college but is worried about doing all that paperwork. So by taking all that away with a universal program, we’re making it much more accessible.”

Messer is also a member of the oversight committee, which is managed by the Department of Children, Youth and Families.

“That’s all bureaucracy that needs to be paid for. So it costs money to take money back from people, to save the city money,” she explained.

 

Leaving Money On the Table

Over the past three years, the average amount spent on covering student tuition was approximately $8 million—less than half of the $18.9 million previously provided by the real estate tax. However, Wong explained that the city knew from the get-go that the allotted funding for student enrollment costs was a surplus. The philosophy being that Free City would attract more students and account for a burgeoning enrollment. That was until the Covid-19 pandemic struck the following year. Across the first two years of the pandemic, colleges nationwide saw a loss of nearly half a million new undergraduates.

To base funding for the college on post-covid enrollment numbers and the recent spell of unstable leadership, at a time when the Ocean campus facilities and Ingleside community are in the early stages of a renaissance, appears to representatives at the college to be at best a short-sighted band-aid to address the city’s more significant issues. 

In 2023, City College received an independent financial audit without any negative findings for the first time since 1997. Construction of the new state-of-the-art resource centers and education facilities is nearing completion. An affordable housing project in the Balboa Reservoir will soon bring more than 1,000 new residents within a stone’s throw of these new facilities on Ocean campus. Next to come is a Performing Arts Center with the potential to showcase a vast array of concerts, plays, and art shows to the local community. 

Despite this and the recent uptick in enrollment, accreditors have warned the college of the fiscal challenges to come, including a revenue freeze in the 2025-26 fiscal year that will remain until the college can significantly increase enrollment.

“Cutting the Free City program now would disrupt the good progress we have made and destabilize the college,” Wong said.

Breed’s budget proposal stated that the program’s funding would be reduced to $7.15 million by 2025-26. 

“In that second year, there’s clearly not enough to even meet what’s been the average level of support,” Wilkins said.
“I would hope the reasonable, ordinary person would understand that if we had access to multiples of millions of dollars that we can use at our own discretion to help support our students, why wouldn’t we have done that? There’s strings attached…”

 

Roadmap For the Future

Representatives from the Free City Oversight Committee say the money left on the table represents a laundry list of missed opportunities to continue to improve enrollment.

Before the Free City Oversight Committee can utilize any leftover funds, it must be approved by the mayor’s office and the Board of Supervisors. Just last year, they pulled this off for the first time after advocating for the city to allow them to use some of the funds to eliminate tuition debt and fees for more than 13,000 students.

Many of these students owed money to the college because they dropped their classes too late in the semester and were prevented from re-enrolling because they owed money for what had previously been covered by the tuition grants. 

“I would say there’s a lot of red tape and bureaucracy. We have to go through a process of approval from the mayor, all of which takes time,” Student Trustee Heather Brandt said. 

Faced with this entanglement of red tape, the oversight committee has been discussing the desire to change the structure of Free City so that they do not have to continuously undergo an approval process.

Wong discussed many of the basic needs students require, from technology to transit.

“In a study that Student Trustee Brandt shared with me a while back, it added up to a little over $1,000 a year for our students to cover their transit costs. Instead of the city taking that money, I would like to see them authorize us to use it to benefit students.”

City College students face a diverse set of financial barriers to continuing their education and could benefit from childcare stipends or support with housing.

“It’s really hard when Free City Oversight Committee is in one place, where we want to do these things to open up education and be more inclusive, and then we have these top-down decisions landing on us where it looks like the money is not going to afford us the ability to expand in the creative ways we wanted to,” explained Brandt.

Alan Wong discussed the need for a cohesive plan that outlines specific examples of use, such as transit costs, to propose to the city as an alternative means of addressing the unspent funds. He commended the oversight committee for already initiating those conversations.

“The City hasn’t authorized us to use it for other things. So when they’re saying that’s extra money, I don’t take it that way. They signed a 10-year agreement. That money should be going towards City College students,” Wong said.

 

 

 

Put the ‘Community’ Back in City College

City officials wasted no time reacting to the proposed cuts to the Free City program.

On June 27, the Board of Trustees discussed the adoption of a “Resolution Supporting the Preservation of Free City College and the Memorandum of Understanding Between the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco Community College District.”

Then, at the Board of Supervisors meeting on July 16, Myrna Melgar introduced a resolution “Urging the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families to Expeditiously Negotiate an Updated MOU for the Free City College Program.”

The Board officially adopted the resolution on July 23. Supervisors Melgar, Chan, Ronen, Peskin, Safaí, Preston, Stefani, and Walton were all listed as sponsors.

 

On Oct. 24, CCSF HEAT (Higher Education Action Team) organized a protest outside the Multi-Use Building. Former mayoral candidates Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí both made appearances to share their views on the city’s reduction to the program.

“We wanted to reinvigorate the enrollment at City College so that it could get back on its feet,” said Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors.

“The people of San Francisco said yes, by voting for Prop A back in those days and giving this institution the capital dollars that it needed. We then responded as the Board of Supervisors and did something that is fantastic public policy, which is making it free for San Francisco to go to City College.”

Fellow board member Ahsha Safaí expressed his own concerns to the college community:
“When I was on the Board of Supervisors in my first year, we made sure that by the mandate of the voters, City College would be free. And it was only in this budget, for the first time, that the mayor reneged on a deal that was made with the board,” Safaí said.

As the dust begins to settle after election day, the fate of the Free City program remains to be seen. City College is still waiting to hear back about a proposal from the mayor’s office on how to proceed.

When Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie was asked during the SF NAACP Youth Mayoral forum if he would fully commit to returning funding for the Free City College program to the 2023 level, Lurie replied, “We need Free City College.”

However, after praising the training programs that create a pipeline for living-wage jobs and claiming his family’s involvement with training at City College, Lurie quickly pivoted the focal point of his response to the need for a pathway for early childhood educators. He took time to boast his family’s history of funding early childhood education centers throughout the Bay Area while making no attempt to specifically address the need for restored funding levels to Free City.

At the time of publishing this article, Lurie’s office has not yet responded to the Guardsman’s request for comment on the issue of Free City budget cuts.

 

“Now they’re trying to take our money, even though there are all these news articles that we’re seeing that City College has a budget problem. It’s kind of ironic that they’re taking away our money to deal with theirs,” Wong said.

Students like Redondiez hope that for now, they can continue to contribute to their community through free and inclusive access to City College.

“We have to make sure that we’re fighting to meet the needs and demands of the people, that includes immigrants and working class, because that’s what a community is, and what a community college is supposed to be for,” Redondiez said.