Articles about Pima Community College

Arizona has a new law that will stop Pima Community College from using inflated enrollment estimates to stay within its state spending limit.

House Bill 1322, signed into law Thursday by Governor Doug Ducey, forces community colleges to use an average of actual enrollment instead of estimates to calculate their spending caps.

A college’s spending limit, separate from its budget, restricts the amount of local revenue such as taxes that can legally be spent each year. It does not limit how other revenue, such as tuition dollars, can be spent.

The new law also allows community colleges to count a student taking career and technical training as 1.3 students when calculating spending limits, since such programs often are more expensive to operate.

And it permits colleges to exempt certain types of revenue — such as funding from community business partners — from the spending limit calculations.

Ducey spokeswoman Annie Dockendorff said the new law will “ensure our community colleges are producing a quality workforce that meets the needs of industry.”

A PCC news release said the changes will enhance the school’s ability to train workers for jobs in “high-skill, high-wage technical fields.”

Under the previous law, PCC regularly overestimated its enrollment by 30 to 40 percent, which kept its spending limit artificially high as the school’s enrollment plunged over the past five years.

State lawmakers may put a stop to Pima Community College’s longtime practice of overstating its enrollment to prop up its spending limit.

A bill supported by some legislators but opposed by a tax watchdog would force the school to reduce its annual spending ceiling by basing it on an average of actual enrollment instead of on estimates.

Current rules allow colleges to estimate the number of students they expect to serve that year to calculate their spending limits. PCC typically overestimates by 30 to 40 percent, which has kept its spending ceiling from dropping in tandem as the school’s enrollment plunges.

Between 2012 and 2015, for example, the Tucson school’s actual enrollment fell 25 percent while its spending limit, based on the inflated estimates, fell by just 11 percent.

A college’s spending limit, which is separate from its budget, caps the amount of local tax revenue a school can spend. It does not limit how other revenue, such as tuition dollars, can be spent.

The House Government and Higher Education Committee is expected to hear SB 1322 Thursday, March 3. The measure, which would apply to all community colleges, has already passed the Senate.

Had the proposal been in effect this school year, PCC’s $114.4 million spending limit would have fallen by nearly $4 million to $110.6 million, school officials say.

That’s a much softer hit than the college would have taken under similar bills proposed this year and last. A version floated in 2014, for example, would have required PCC to make budget cuts of around $30 million.

Pima isn’t the only Arizona school to use inflated enrollment figures to calculate its spending limit but it’s “probably the biggest abuser” of the current system, said Sean McCarthy of the Arizona Tax Research Association, the statewide group that’s been pushing for changes to how spending limits are calculated.

The group pushed this year for a different reform bill that would have reduced PCC’s spending limit by about $16 million, but that proposal hasn’t found support among lawmakers.

SB 1322 would require colleges to use a five-year average of actual enrollment to calculate spending limits. An amendment added at PCC’s urging would allow schools to use a 10-year enrollment average for the first three years to keep spending limits from falling too quickly at schools with declining enrollment.

The bill also would allow colleges to count a student taking career and technical training as 1.3 students when calculating spending limits since such programs often are more expensive to operate.

The current system for determining spending limits, “makes no sense in 2016,” said state Sen. Steve Farley of Tucson, one of SB 1322’s sponsors.

“The world has changed since 1980,” when the current rules were established, Farley said. “Some of the programs being offered today cost a lot more to run,” he said.

When a college loses enrollment as quickly as PCC, it doesn’t necessarily follow that its spending should drop to the same degree, Farley said.

“There is a limit to how far you can adjust your spending downward without having a permanent free-fall,” he said.

McCarthy said he’s “expecting kind of a battle in the House” when the measure is debated.

He’ll be arguing against the provisions that allow for 10-year averaging and weighting for career and technical students, measures his group deems too generous to properly protect taxpayers.

PCC Governing Board member Demion Clinco said college officials are keeping fingers crossed that the bill passes in its current form.

“It isn’t perfect,” he said of the measure. “But it would give the college some financial certainty going forward.”

If it passes the committee Thursday, the bill will also have to clear the House Appropriations Committee and get the go-ahead from the full House before it can proceed.

A federal program that aims to train low-income people for well-paying health care jobs has had limited success in Tucson and elsewhere since it started five years ago, data shows.

About a third of the 1,800 locals who enrolled in the program at Pima Community College went on to work in health care and those who did earn an average of $12.44 an hour, initial results show.

The Health Profession Opportunity Grant program, authorized by Congress in 2010 under the Affordable Care Act, offers free healthcare job training, remedial help, transportation and other support services to public assistance clients and others in poverty.

The goal is to get participants into “high-demand careers in health care that pay well,” the program’s website says.

Nationally, fewer than half the program’s 38,000 or so participants are working in health care five years after the test effort began, data shows.

The national average for participants in health care jobs is $12.57 an hour, about $26,000 a year for a full-time worker.

MORE MONEY ON THE WAY

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently announced plans to spend $324 million to extend the program for another five years. That’s slightly less than the $340 million tab for the first five years.

PCC, which has received $15 million since 2010, is on deck to receive another $15 million by 2020.

Congress authorized the effort as a “demonstration program” – in effect, a long-term experiment – to see what works best to get disadvantaged people into health care jobs expected to have shortages of workers.

PCC spokesperson Libby Howell said the extra federal spending is needed because conquering poverty is a long and arduous process.

Program participants often have troubled pasts, Howell said. They may come from chronically impoverished families, have little or no work history and have such low self-esteem that job hunting is “a daunting and difficult task,” she said in an email interview.

PCC’s results are “not uncommon” among the 30 or so other institutions nationwide that receive grant money under the program, Howell said.

She said some participants are so eager to work once they finish training that they grab “quick employment in a non-health care field” and end up staying because they lack confidence to change jobs.

PCC intends to tackle that problem in the program’s second five years by building self-esteem and self-sufficiency training into the program and by improving assistance for job seekers, she added.

STILL JOBLESS

Adrianna Martinez, 29, a single mother who enrolled in the PCC program, was released from federal prison last year after serving four years for drug-dealing.

While in custody, Martinez said, she vowed to better herself and started by earning a high school equivalency diploma behind bars.

“I made decision right then and there that I was going to change my life around,” she said.

Once released, Martinez applied for government aid for needy families and was told she’d need to take job training. PCC trained her as a medical records technician, but six employers have turned her down because of her criminal record, she said.

“They knew it was going to be a struggle for me,” Martinez said of her PCC program advisors.

“We hoped that if I tried to be myself and explain things professionally, someone might give me a chance. But unfortunately, it didn’t happen.”

Despite the roadblock, Martinez said she’s determined to find employment. She plans to take more training through the PCC program, this time in a different field such as social services, to improve her prospects.

Howell, PCC’s spokesperson, says while some health care jobs require a clean criminal record, others, such as medical records and behavioral health, do not.

Howell couldn’t immediately say how many people with felony records have trained for healthcare jobs at PCC, but she estimated the number is small.

SUCCESS STORY

PCC claims Edgar R. Ortiz as one of its success stories, an example of what the program can do at its best.

The Tucson man’s quest to become a registered nurse is featured on a federal website that highlights achievements of program participants around the country. He could not be reached for further comment.

Ortiz, 61, found himself unemployed in 2011 when he was laid off after 20 years as the manager of a printing firm, the federal website says.

He’d always wanted to go into nursing, and the federal program at PCC gave him the chance. First he became a certified nursing assistant. He then trained to become a practical nurse, and plans to go back a third time to become a registered nurse.

Without the program, “I would still be struggling to find a meaningful job,” the website quotes Ortiz as saying.

“I was doing temporary jobs and there was no direction or a future. It was just something to pay the bills. Now I have a purpose.”

Like Ortiz, many program participants start out in lower-paid jobs such as nursing assistant. The hope is they’ll eventually come back and train for positions with more earning potential, officials said.

Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the federal Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the program, said the effort is being closely evaluated to see how well goals were met.

At PCC, spokeswoman Howell said, the program has given hope “to many individuals who never thought they would be able to find a job, let alone enter college and have a career.”

A faculty group at Pima Community College is surveying its members to see if they still have confidence in the school’s CEO.

And the head of PCC’s Governing Board is incensed.

“It sounds like you are trying to incite the faculty against the chancellor,” board chair Sylvia Lee said Monday, publicly lambasting a faculty leader at a session the board held to dispute the need for the survey question.

The Pima Community College Education Association, a union-like group that represents about half of PCC’s 300 or so full-time faculty, is asking faculty members whether they support holding a confidence vote on the performance of Chancellor Lee Lambert.

The question is one of many included this year in an annual survey the group conducts to solicit feedback and concerns from the academic workforce.

Ana Jimenez, a vice president of the faculty association, defended the decision to ask about support for Lambert’s leadership.

The question was included because some faculty members are asking it among themselves and in talks with faculty leaders, she told the board. The survey will determine whether the view is widespread, she added.

In an Oct. 6 email to faculty that previewed the annual survey, Jimenez said faculty leadership has tried to protect PCC’s image in recent years by keeping quiet while the college adopted “one poorly implemented change (after) another.”

Criticisms include faulty internal communication and faculty being left out of key decisions, such as changes made this past summer to PCC’s mission statement and faculty evaluation system while the faculty was away.

“I believe it is time to band together to turn this ship around,” Jimenez wrote.

“We must stand together and unite against the type of unilateral decisions that have plagued this administration and caused so much damage.”

The board chair’s angst over the survey question didn’t sit well with the board’s newest member, Tucson deputy city manager Martha Durkin.

Durkin said the board has no business telling a faculty group what to include in its survey.

“It feels like we don’t want to ask the question because we won’t like the answer,” she said.

Lee wanted the board to send a page-long statement to faculty that protested the survey question. At Durkin’s urging, the board only approved sending three non-accusatory paragraphs. (Documents related to this story are online at tucson.com.)

Lambert kept quiet at Monday’s board meeting as the conflict unfolded.

In an email Friday sent through his spokesperson, the chancellor said he was hired to “move the college forward in the face of unprecedented change.

“Progress can be difficult and sometimes painful, but in the end, the college will be better for our efforts,” Lambert said.

The faculty survey closes Nov. 30. Results typically are presented to the board at a public meeting.