Mt. Vernon Register-News

Local

December 11, 2009

RLC dealing with funding shortage

By RORYE O’CONNOR

rorye.oconnor@register-news.com

INA — As Rend Lake College receives 40 percent of its funding from the state, administrators are formulating a plan to cut costs to get through the rest of the fiscal year without late payments from the state.

Larry West, vice president of finance, said the state owes RLC more than $4.5 million dollars in payments to the operations and maintenance fund and the general operating budget, among others, and school administrators expect rearranging what funds they have to be a painful process.

“If you cut that funding, of course it’s going to hurt,” West said. “Our plan is to cut expenditures and allocate resources in such a way to get through the fiscal year.”

West said the staff are looking at every department in the community college to cut back.

“A lot of the things we’ve done in the past, we can’t do, and that includes some services to the students,” he said.

West mentioned class field trips as one of the parts of “the learning experience” that may be taken off the list of possibilities for professors.

RLC is implementing a hiring “chill,” in which only key positions will be refilled. However, the college is not considering layoffs or a tuition hike, at least this fiscal year.

“Raising tuition is one of the conditions we’re looking at, but not this spring,” West said. “We really hate to put the burden on the back of the students, but the state may leave us no other option.”

West said the school was not already in deficit spending, but it might have to begin borrowing from its reserves in the next fiscal year if the state’s financial outlook does not improve.

“We have very strong balance sheets because we have a lot of assets, but we can’t liquidate those assets because a lot of them are things like buildings,” West said.

He said the school was in no danger of having to shut down this fiscal year, but added that RLC is very dependent on state funding.

Students may be hurting in other ways than the possibility of raised tuition due to the state’s $11 billion deficit for the fiscal years 2009 and 2010, however. West said the college had been told the state will be funding MAP Grants, but no payments had been seen for those as of yet.

“The Illinois Monetary Award Program (MAP) Grant is available from the Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC) to Illinois residents who are undergraduate students at an Illinois college who are enrolled in at least three credit hours,” states information from the ISAC Web site. “The MAP grant is applied to in-district tuition and mandatory fees only and does not include class or lab fees. Students must list Illinois and their state of legal residence on their FAFSA form to be processed for a MAP grant.”

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