The nearly $700 million in state budget cuts targeted at SUNY are taking their toll on thousands of working families. The family of UUP delegate Dawn Leadley of Upstate Medical University is among them.

Fewer course offerings and class sections have frustrated Dawn’s daughter, Courtney, in her pursuit of a SUNY degree. The problems started when Courtney was a freshman looking to register for engineering courses at the University at Buffalo.

“She couldn’t get into the lower engineering classes, because upper-class engineering students were filling them,” Dawn said. “She would get edged out because there weren’t enough faculty to teach the number of students they had.” Courtney ran into the same problem enrolling in required math courses, so after three years at UB, she gave up on the idea of an engineering degree. She transferred to SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry to pursue environ-mental biology, but ran into obstacles there, too. She was unable to register for a required field research course.

“There were hundreds of people in the room trying to get into this class and it was filled in five minutes,” Dawn said.

As a result, it will take Courtney five years to earn her bachelor’s degree, an extra expense that many New York families are bearing due to budget reductions. Sharon Sofranko, a NYSUT member who works in the Hunter Tannersville School District, had a similar experience with her daughter, Sara. Sara is due to graduate in May from SUNY Cortland, but getting there wasn’t easy.

“Sara couldn’t get the classes she needed, so she ended up having to take summer and intersession courses, some of them online and at a community college,” her mother said. “Even though she started college with six credit hours, we still ended up paying for more than four years of college.”

Sharon thinks the deep budget cuts that complicated her daughter’s college experience were not merely about the state’s financial deficit.

“Because if it were,” Sharon said, “lawmakers would have extended the millionaire’s tax.”

— Donald Feldstein