ON CAMPUS
Adult fun classes pay their way
By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer
Today's quiz:
If you have to cut the Department of Education budget, you should reduce expenditures for:
- Reading
- Writing
- Arithmetic
- Line dancing
The answer is, well, obvious.
The governor must trim the state budget to meet revenue shortfalls. To that end, she proposes cutting half of DOE's $5.5 million adult education program.
"We feel very strongly that adult education in teaching karaoke and country line dancing is not a core function of the Department of Education," Lingle has said. She said cutting half the budget would still allow continuation of programs for essential topics such as English as a second language for people who can't afford private classes.
It won't.
Compared to the necessary mission of teaching reading and math, line dancing and karaoke look like a pretty good place to start chopping. But those classes are self-sustaining. The enrollment fees cover the entire cost of the classes.
If you eliminate the classes, there's no money saved. And no one's auntie will be taking tai chi classes or learning about feng shui at the local high school anymore.
Those recreation and leisure classes seem to be pretty popular. At the Kaimuki Community School for Adults, 205 people took feng shui this year; 78 took self-defense for women. At the latest count for this fiscal year, 10,249 students have enrolled in 734 different leisure classes across the state. People are taking hula, quilting, tennis and yoga in record numbers.
State schools superintendent Pat Hamamoto said most of the adult education budget pays for a more serious mission: adult literacy and high school diplomas, citizenship training for recent immigrants and English-as-a-second-language classes.
Cutting the adult education budget means the DOE needs to find $2.7 million somewhere else to keep free classes operating for people who couldn't otherwise afford them: immigrants learning English, the unemployed learning new job skills or high school dropouts returning to night school.
A total of 21,762 people are enrolled in the DOE's Community Schools system.
A state audit in October recommended that the adult education program be turned over to the community college system to improve efficiency and oversight.
But many members of the school board say poor efficiency is because small, self-supporting classes are being offered in school cafeterias and gyms. People have the convenience of going to the closest school without finding a way to get to a UH campus and consulting a map to find the right building. So basically, the board is happy that people can take classes all over the place.
A Senate Ways and Means Committee draft of the budget rejected Lingle's proposal to cut adult education. That doesn't mean the issue won't resurface.
When 500 people showed up to protest the cuts at the Capitol, Farrington Community School for Adults principal Liberato Viduya said it was the fourth time in six years that adult education supporters had to fight to save the program.
It may be true that leisure classes shouldn't fall into the realm of the DOE. But whether the DOE should be offering these kinds of classes is a separate issue from whether they're costing anything.
Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.
