Students who are interested in taking summer classes will find fewer choices in the catalog.

This summer, DVC is going to offer 400 sections, about a 25 percent reduction from the 535 sections offered to students in summer 2010.

“They are saving money at the expense of students,” said David Sherr, a DVC film student. “It is penny wise and pound foolish.”

According to Ted Wieden, the interim dean of curriculum and instruction, faculty members were appointed to join an ad-hoc Joint Schedule Task Force.

“What we allowed faculty to do was shift schedule reductions from the fall over to the summer schedule,” Wieden said. This was done as a result of a general consensus that the fall schedule has priority over the summer schedule. The task force was put in charge of going through the schedule and recommending which courses were to be cut.

They looked at classes offered last summer with multiple sections, then they counted the maximum number of students enrolling in those classes. Therefore, according to Wieden, they cut classes this summer that had multiple sections and low enrollment last summer, minimizing the possible impact for students.

Wieden did acknowledge that the criteria is not perfect as it fails to consider if there are increases in demand for certain courses that weren’t around last year, but according to him, this is the best way to make these cuts while maintaining as much normalcy as possible for the college experience.

Students are skeptical about how much normalcy there will be after these cuts. “The morally skewed policies made by the administration is leading to the destruction/privatization of California’s community colleges,” said political science student Arman Kalyani.

Ian Humphries, fine arts student, calls for his fellow students to lose the apathy. “I am sick of the lack of student political activism and involvement with the campus especially when the faculty are fighting the cuts,” he says.

According to Nancy Zink, the English department chair, the college departments were put in charge to implement these cuts.    

“I think it is going to decimate summer school,” said Barbara Sawyer, a DVC English instructor and former advisor of the Inquirer.

While the summer schedule is taking this big reduction, DVC is restoring some of the courses cut from the fall schedule, according to an email sent to department chairs by Wieden.

This is because the college wants to receive state funds for a forecasted increase in full time equivalent students (FTES) which is a student enrolled in 12 units and the college’s main source of funding.

This is all as a result of an updated review of the proposed district budget as the District’s Governing Board modified DVC’s enrollment cap for 2011-12 up to 15,720 FTES rather than the previous estimate of 15,187 FTES.

Nick Lazaga, who’s majoring in business administration, says, “By cutting all of these classes (especially non-general ed) Americans are going to become useless and will become ineffective at living.”