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Volume 110 - Issue 02
Dance auditions - Page 5
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September 23, 2009
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No smoke on the horizon? Work Environment Committee discusses the possibility of Pierce going smoke-free Elliot Golan / Roundup
P
ierce College students may soon be attending a smoke-free school. In their monthly meeting Sept. 15, the Pierce College Work Environment Committee (WEC) discussed going smoke-free, according to Dr. Leland Shapiro, director of the pre-veterinary program and WEC member. “We will be (smoke-free) if people don’t respect the designated smoking areas,” Shapiro said. The WEC addresses many topics on campus including workplace safety, environmental concerns and smoking. Shapiro, an asthmatic, considers smoking a major issue. “We have a constitutional right to a safe working environment,” Shapiro said. According to the American Lung Association, secondhand smoke can have a wide range of adverse health effects including cancer, respiratory infections and asthma.
Gerard Walsh / Roundup
UP IN SMOKE— Jose Bruno, a Pierce College student, smokes a cigarette right outside his electronics class during a break.
Pierce would not be the first to make this decision. There are 12 smokefree campuses in the state and 16 more that restrict smoking to parking lots, including nearby Moorpark College. Shapiro also mentioned the city of Calabasas, whose Comprehensive Second-Hand Smoke Control Ordinance prohibits smoking in all public places in the city wherever others can be exposed. “Nothing at this point has been decided,” said Melody Cooper, WEC
chair and instructor of art. The map on the back page of the Fall 2009 Schedule of Classes illustrates eight designated smoking areas scattered throughout the campus. According to Shapiro, that hasn’t worked out the way it was supposed to. “Pierce has authority to enforce it, but has elected not to,” Shapiro said. SEE SMOKING PAGE 3
Picking up the PACE Petrina J. Roudebush / Roundup
ELIMINATING— Pierce College is considering eliminating waiting lists from the class-registration process, with several classes already having removed them. The semester has started with much fuller classes.
Waiting lists on the way Pierce is slowly removing waiting lists from classes Alina Popov / Roundup After 18 months of broad consultations and discussions, the Pierce College administration decided to eliminate waiting lists from the class-registration process beginning in the spring. “The issue with waiting lists is one that sets off the convenience of getting students lined up in preparation for being accepted to classes that (are already) full against the problems of the registration system that we have,“ said Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh, vice president of academic affairs.
Pierce uses the Los Angeles Community College District’s Student Information System, a unified system comprising nine colleges and around 150,000 students. The system, written in the outdated programming language KOBOL, doesn’t give control of waiting lists, resulting in many empty seats. An update to the current system is unlikely because the system would be too difficult and costly to modify. The district is currently exploring the options for a new system, but the project will take a long time because of the size and cost of the upgrade, as well as testing to ensure
a smooth transition. Currently, if a section has a waiting list, classes are closed once they fill up and students are added to the waiting list until it reaches its limit. The class will not reopen when students drop it, which restricts students from registering for the open seats. “At the beginning of the semester we have thousands of seats that have been held back by the registration system, which should have become available again to students to register,” Abu-Ghazaleh said. “We have an artificial and unnecessary system that locks students out of seats that we actually want
them to register in.” The admissions office enrolls around 3,000 students between the first day of school and the last day to add classes, accounting for 15 to 20 percent of the total semester enrollment. Without waiting lists, as soon as seats are available, the class will reopen and let people add. The semester will start with much fuller classes, some filled weeks before the beginning of school. Originally all Pierce classes had waiting lists. For the last 18 months, the college was moving slowly to removing waiting lists, SEE WAITING LIST PAGE 3
The program has had a steady increase in enrollment with more students than ever Lorrie Reyes / Roundup The Program for Accelerated College Education’s (PACE) number of available class sections has dropped from approximately 42 sections in Fall 2008 to 31 sections this semester at Pierce College. According to PACE Director Art Gillis, this is the main reason PACE class sizes have risen steadily. The number of students enrolled in the PACE program and PACE Bridge classes in Fall 2009 has increased to 1,780 students from 1,561 students in one year. The decrease in the number of sections and the increase of students in PACE can be attributed to the continuous budget cuts that the Los Angeles Community College District had to impose on the nine colleges in the district, including Pierce. “The increase is not dramatic,” Gillis said, “but it appears so because we have so few classes.” The Pierce PACE program is aimed toward working adults who
are busy with full-time jobs and/ or families and are specifically designed to help students graduate or transfer to four-year university. Students attend designated courses that meet one evening a week and five Saturdays in an eight-week period. The largest challenge for professors is the preparation for their lectures. Some PACE professors are currently teaching their largest classes to date, ranging from 80 students to almost 140 students during Saturday sessions. “Your lectures have to be more precise and concise in the delivery of lectures, and therefore that makes it more challenging,” said PACE professor Edward Gika, who is currently teaching Humanities 31. Although the number of students is rising in PACE classrooms, both professors and students are aware of the situation and are trying to embrace the increase. “[The class size] doesn’t matter. It actually feels like a university SEE PACE PAGE 3