If students haven’t already heard, there is a possibility that Cerritos College might be changing to a 16-week school session that would be implemented in about two years.

Cerritos College is one of the last community colleges to still have 18-week sessions.

Community colleges like Rio Hondo, Mt. San Antonio, Pasadena City, Santa Monica, East Los Angeles, Long Beach and El Camino moved to a 16-week system.

ASCC Senator Luis Guzman met with a task force and came up and presented a resolution at an ASCC Senate meeting on April 1 to bring more attention to this plan.

Guzman said, “I heard of this idea a month ago, it was one of professor Namalas’ reports that he did for faculty senate, I presented a resolution in ASCC Senate to show that the students want this, and they want to be part of the process.”

According to Solomon Namala, President of Cerritos College Faculty Foundation, many studies have shown that the shorter semester, the more engaged the students are.

“When we seriously talked about it in 2008 or so, we actually had another task force like this and we met and we said ok we are going to do this by 2010 or so but the recession hit and the president at the time said to implement this at the time we needed about $250,000 to do this change. So it got postponed,” Namala said.

Students drop out of school for various reasons ranging from jobs, tuition and textbook rates increasing, personal life and Namala had noticed that students usually drop out at 14 weeks.

Pros: Students retention and success rate increase when term is shorter Cerritos College aligned with CSUs, transferring would be smoother possible winter session because there is an extra month.

Cons: Higher administrative costs (costs for programming registration and record keeping) Some programs may be affected by increase in class meeting times longer class hours there is a task force which represents faculty and Namala is the faculty union president.

The two task force meetings left will be held April 29 at 4:30 p.m. at the LA conference room and May 13 at 4:30 p.m. at the LA conference room.

The final decision about this change would be up to the school president and Board of Trustees.

Namala said, “If they say yes, we want commitment from faculty administration and we need a firm date and we would like to have this start in two years from now, that’s our goal but we don’t know what our administration will say.”