Clatsop Community College leadership laid off five full-time positions in March, moved other positions to part-time and has proposed suspending three programs going into the next academic year, citing low enrollment and a $700,000 budget deficit due to rising costs.
The programs facing suspension include the automotive technology program, computer aided design and drafting, and the historic preservation and restoration program.
The college has an obligation to “teach out” current students in the programs within a certain time frame, but no new students will be enrolled for now. College President Jarrod Hogue said he is hoping for “a pause.”
“It does not necessarily mean the college cannot still offer individual classes or targeted programming in those areas where there is student interest, workforce relevance or strategic value,” Hogue wrote in an email to staff obtained by KMUN.
“A pause also creates an opportunity to reassess the future needs of the broader industry and ensure stronger alignment with labor market demand,” Hogue continued. “With industry input and support, we can build a more sustainable pathway.”
Among the full-time positions eliminated are the career and technical education director position as well as the college’s only full-time librarian, Dan McClure, who served as the library director.
“I’m hoping the students and community will be resilient in the aftermath of these changes,” McClure told KMUN. “The success of the college is vitally important to our region.”
Hogue said the library director position will become part-time and will be filled by a current college employee with a library science degree.
The college’s Patriot Hall, a health and fitness facility, will no longer have a dedicated coordinator position. Some other positions that the college hoped to fund will be put on hold for now, including full-time faculty positions in chemistry and social sciences next year.
The college also plans to close the campus store and repurpose the space into a hub for student collaboration, career center services and Associated Student Government.
Hogue said the changes are due to the current $700,000 deficit for the next fiscal year, but also because of anticipated large increases in the college’s Public Employee Retirement System liability, the state-mandated retirement plan for public employees, in the next biennium. The college is looking at another potential $700,000 just in pension liability costs.
Hogue noted that Clatsop Community College is not alone in facing these financial challenges. In recent weeks, Lane Community College in Eugene announced it was looking at a $4 million deficit and was considering significant layoffs.
“The state funding that we’re receiving is not at pace with our cost to run the institution,” Hogue said of Clatsop.
Then there is the low enrollment seen in some of the programs coupled with the low rates of student completion. Hogue said those numbers speak for themselves.
The college’s nursing and medical assistant programs remain strong as do the lower-division transfers, those students taking classes with the intent of transferring to a university, Hogue said.
“Where we struggle is with some of these other programs that have had just a handful of students for maybe the last six or seven years,” Hogue said. “At some point, it just becomes too much to sustain with limited resources.”
The layoffs of the five full-time employees have already happened, but the college administration’s proposals for other cuts — including the proposal to suspend the automotive technology, computer aided design and drafting and historic preservation and restoration programs — still need to be approved by the college’s board of education.
Those will be part of a proposed budget Hogue will present to the board at the end of April.
He expects there may be questions and potentially pushback, especially from some in the community over the suspension of the historic preservation program. He stands by the proposed cuts.
“There’s always going to be tough decisions and I don’t think delaying decisions and putting the college in a rough financial situation or adding to the financial challenges is the way to go,” Hogue said, adding, “I think it’s being smart about how we’re allocating, how we’re spending, where are the areas that we can cut that have the least impact on students and so those are the decisions, the tough decisions, that we have to make.”
Ed Johnson, chair for the Clatsop Community College board of education, agreed.
“With these cuts we’re just trying to get ourselves in a position where we’re stable,” he told KMUN, saying it was a logical and thought-out process.
“It’s not just cutting people to cut people,” he said.
As news about the college’s situation trickled out recently, the news about the historic preservation program caught some people off guard, especially past students.
Vance McDermott, formerly Vance Lump, was a student in the program and, until this past fall, a member of the Astoria City Council. He changed his last name from Lump to McDermott following a divorce and no longer lives in the area.
He began taking classes with the college’s historic preservation program during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was looking for a career change and quickly zeroed in on what would become his niche: windows. For the past four years now, work on historic windows has been his entire business.
McDermott started his business while in the historic preservation program, but never completed the program.
“I think I have like one or two classes I still need to do officially if I were to graduate,” he said. “But for me the point was not getting the degree, but getting a career and I had achieved that, so I didn’t really need to get the paper.”
Other historic preservation students KMUN interviewed described similar approaches and experiences. They told KMUN that Hogue’s focus on program completion and enrollment numbers as markers of the program’s success doesn’t capture the true impact of the program.
They described fellow students who are looking to embark on second or even third careers while still managing full-time jobs. Some of them only need specific classes. The cost and time commitment means some students on a degree track need to spread out when they take classes.
The program is a unique offering at a community college and its students have engaged in highly visible collaborations with local governments and organizations including the National Park Service to research, restore and maintain historic structures in the area.
But some current and former students also wondered if the program has received the resources necessary to help it succeed, stand out and recruit more students.
The program has not had a full-time faculty member for at least the past two years. Lucien Swerdloff, who was one of the program’s founders and helped lead it for more than two decades, retired in 2022. John Goodenberger, a well-known local historian and a historic preservation consultant, is a part-time faculty member.
McDermott sees an ongoing need for the program in a city like Astoria that values preservation and is filled with historic homes and structures.
“As buildings get older and older, there’s not enough people to continue to maintain them,” he said, adding, “The city has a goal to have more jobs available for people locally that aren’t based in the service sector … The trades are something that is ripe for opportunity and so to see something like this get suspended I think is really kind of just going in the wrong direction.”
For Zoe Higginbottom, the classes were a friendly introduction to the trades and a way to tackle work on her own historic home after she struggled to find contractors. She hopes to turn what she’s learning into a career.
Higginbottom is on the degree track for the program, but can only take a few classes each term. She has a disabled partner and works full-time at the Blue Scorcher Bakery in Astoria. She is the only person in her household who makes money.
Higginbottom is also on the college’s budget committee, a position she took on because of concerns about how the historic preservation program was resourced.
Now, with the budget proposals on the table, she says she’ll be going into meetings this month with a lot of questions.