By CHARLOTTE PERKINS
Journal Staff Writer
For all the talk of drastic budget cuts, for all the loss of jobs in human services fields and the furloughing of teachers, this week the bare mention of eliminating a century-old service to Georgia’s youth got e-mails flying and Facebook buzzing.
And, while Perry’s Larry Walker, who’s on the University system’s Board of Regents, says it won’t happen, and that “cooler heads will prevail,” the idea that University officials would eliminate not only the entire 4-H program, but also slash the already-underfunded County Extension service by nearly 50 percent, has people who don’t normally pay that much attention to state government hitting the telephones and e-mail to let their representatives know their views.
Don’t blame your state senator and representative though. They didn’t come up with the idea.
Here’s what happened. On February 24, Errol Davis, the Chancellor of the state’s university system, met with the joint House-Senate higher education appropriations sub-committee, which plans to cut $300 million from the University System’s state budget. (Larry Walker says he doesn’t think it’s going to be that much in the end.)
Davis was apparently instructed to come up with a list of cuts that could be made to achieve that cut, which is one is a series of funding slashes going back two years. Subsequently a 147-page document was put together with input from all of the institutions in the system, and on the first page of that document, the estimated $6.3 million needed to run the 4-H program was proposed for elimination, along with massive cuts to the County Extension system, which runs the 4-H program. Both of these are under the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Service
Walker said of the Chancellor’s proposal, “The Board of Regents hasn’t really met on it or seen it. And I will defend the 4-H program vigilantly.”
While the 4-H program elimination and the 50 percent reduction of the County Extension service are getting the lion’s share of the attention, the cuts in the proposal would hurt in many more ways. In this area, both Macon State College, which has a new campus in Warner Robins, and Fort Valley State University will have programs and positions on the chopping block.
Macon State’s proposal includes “reorganizing the Warner Robins Campus and Robins Residence Center with a cut of $249, 602” and FVSU would have cuts of over $2.5 million in “programs that address major agricultural issues,” and would also cut over $400,000 in academic programs, which could require students to transfer or change their majors in order to graduate.
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