Colorado’s higher education funding is in trouble, and Metro is rallying people to help.

The state’s politicians have four months to draw up the 2010-2011 fiscal year budget, and Colorado’s money is short. $1.6 billion short.

Spreading the word through its series of “advocacy training” workshops intended to give a “how to” on political participation, college officials are urging all Roadrunners, past and present, to contact their state representatives in support of higher education.

“There has never been a time that your involvement was more important,” Metro President Stephen Jordan said to the several dozen students, faculty and alumni gathered Jan. 29 for training at St. Cajetan’s Center.

Rachel Frakes, left, and Shawn Hendrickson, share a laugh, Jan. 29, during former State Rep. Cheri Jahn’s speech at the Advocacy Day Task Force training meeting at St. Cajetan’s Center. Frakes is a Metro junior studying behavioral sciences and secondary education and Hendrickson is a junior studying behavioral sciences and environmental sciences. Photo by Tiffany Kassab • tmorri31@mscd.edu

Colorado cut almost 60 percent of the 2009-2010 and replaced the money with Federal Stimulus Funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the state planned to do the same the coming fiscal year starting in July, but almost half the money has already been spent to fill other holes in the budget.

Jordan said higher education faced an “uphill battle” in the coming years, and gave a few points for those present to bring up with their elected officials.

“‘Help us, help ourselves’ is an important theme,” Jordan said, citing the planned Student Success Building and Hotel Learning Center as examples of the state working together with Metro on projects that use outside funding, satisfying both the schools’ need for space and the state’s financial difficulty. Both projects are so-called “self-financing,” using state backing to ensure private investment to fund the construction, as opposed to being purely state or bond-funded as most of Auraria’s buildings have been in the past.

Another point Jordan said needed to be brought home to the legislators was that Metro students get the least funding per person of any of the state’s schools and current cuts would widen that gap.

Colorado funds Metro students under the 2009-2010 fiscal year each around $2,100, where a student at Mesa State College gets more than $4,000 and at Adams State College more than $8,000. Part of that difference, Jordan said, is due to changing enrollments — Metro’s numbers have grown steadily while many schools around the state have lost students — and when the state cuts all schools evenly the number of students is not taken into account.

“We need to ask the legislators respectfully, ‘shouldn’t the cuts be made fairly, taking into consideration enrollment?’” Jordan said.

“It may seem intimidating, but the legislature is actually quite open,” Christine Staberg of the Capstone Group, one of the small team working as Metro’s lobby at the state capitol, told the crowd. Staberg said that any letters or phone calls really made the difference when legislators decide on what to vote, and that hearing an individual’s story and what he or she thinks about an issue can influence their choices. Staberg urged those present to call their representative and ask them out for a cup of coffee.

“Strike up a relationship so when they get your call about a certain bill they will already know who you are,” Staberg said.

Giving the audience another “insider view” of how the capitol works, former state representative Cheri Jahn echoed Staberg’s remarks that citizen involvement was crucial to the process.

“If there was a bill before me …you know I’m not a specialist in most of this stuff … I would look to anyone and everyone I could find who could inform my decision,” Jahn said.

“More than once I got a call from someone who told me why I should vote a certain way … and it would open my eyes to something I hadn’t thought about,” she said.

“This budget has got to be fixed,” Jahn said, “and it will take citizens to do that … Citizens have to do it.”

Metro social work sophomore Tamika Gorman said she attended the meeting to get more information on what was going on with the college’s budget. Now that she had learned more, Gorman said she was going to get more involved.

“I really want to take part in what is going on,” Gorman said. “Education is the very thing we should be funding right now.”

Edward Jacob, Metro alumni member and employee of the IT department, said he was affected twice: he graduated from Metro and worried about his college’s future, and he was employed by the college and was worried about his job.

“It’s scary,” Jacob said. “I’m very concerned about where this budget mess is heading … I have to be involved.”