Putting kids before adults

By the fall, the Adult Education Program, which is just blocks from the Department of Motor Vehicles on Meyer Place in Costa Mesa, will be a shadow of its bustling self.

The English as a second language classrooms now filled by hundreds of adult students — many of them immigrants, many of them limited in their English — will be empty.

The computers will have long been removed.

The staff of 40 teachers will either be unemployed or reassigned in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District.

The only class left will be the high school diploma lab, where a pair of teachers will help students catch up on lost credits so they can graduate. Aside from that, the incessant sort of learning that has become synonymous with the district’s Adult Education Program will cease.

The program’s elimination is part of the $12 million in cuts that the school district needs to make in order to balance its 2010-11 budget, which has been short-changed by declining property tax revenues and state funding.

Newport-Mesa Unified, whose adult program has existed since 1937, isn’t the only district that’s abolishing programs that seek to give adult students a second chance.

Nearly 50 school districts statewide are in the midst of axing adult education for the next four years and redirecting state money into the K-12 classrooms.

Pick a letter between A and Z, and somewhere in between there will be a unified school district in a certain city that’s eliminating its adult education and pouring the money back into the district to boost the pot of sagging general revenues, which have seen better days due to the state’s cutbacks to the tune of billions of dollars.

Anaheim Unified is doing it. So is Irvine, Tustin and Fullerton.

Schwarzenegger’s decision to sign the legislation is a day that lives in infamy for those who have worked for years to educate adults.

Not only do the impending cuts at Newport-Mesa’s adult education program have some 5,000 students worried and scrambling for alternative classes across Orange County, but it also has left the adult program’s administrator, Martha Rankin, disheartened.

“It’s sad,” said Rankin, lead administrator for the last six years. “Our adult education program has been a model for the state. In the last two years alone, we’ve been asked to make presentations at dozens of statewide and national conferences.”