Invoice issues foil Free City program
CCSF still has yet to receive any money from city for free-tuition program
More than a year after San Francisco and City College rolled out a plan to provide free tuition to all city residents, CCSF has yet to receive a single dollar to pay for the program, leaving the college short $4.1 million.
Despite reporting a muchneeded enrollment boost, attributed largely to the free tuition promise, city officials have yet to receive any suitable invoices from CCSF that clearly satisfy all the conditions it agreed to when the free-tuition program was announced last year.
Maria Su, director of San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which is responsible for cutting reimbursement checks for the Free City program, said her office has so far sent back two invoices, one of which she characterized as an “estimate.” Both times, the city returned the invoices with requests for additional details about how CCSF is implementing the program. The DCYF received a third invoice on Feb. 15, and Su said her office is reviewing it.
“Given that it’s a brand-new initiative, it takes time to create and build infrastructure,” Su said, but she added that, “on the city’s side, all we have to do is process the invoice and review the backup documentation. It’s building the infrastructure on the City College side that’s taken longer than expected.”
The central sticking point, Su said, is that CCSF’s invoices and enrollment data have not adequately shown whether the school has been properly guiding students toward student aid money from federal and state sources before dipping into the limited Free City
funds. The contract between the city and CCSF, also known as a memorandum of understanding, requires the college to ensure that all eligible students “exhaust all available funding sources for enrollment fee payment and educationrelated expenses, including federal and state financial aid.”
Under the terms of the agreement between the city and CCSF, the city will cover the tuition and other education-related expenses for San Francisco residents through 2019. The amount the city will pay is capped at just over $11.2 million. The city also provided CCSF with a one-time grant of $500,000 to get the freetuition program up and running, which included hiring two new CCSF financial aid counselors. The payment problem was first reported by the school newspaper, the Guardsman.
Su said that, so far, “we’ve had a hard time trying to understand or figure out how City College was using our dollars as last dollars,” meaning money of last resort.
CCSF spokesman Jeff Hamilton said in an email that “determining the correct charges involves assessing complicated data. Disaggregating this data within the criteria set by the city while also maintaining student confidentiality and meeting our own federal and state mandates is complicated.”
The hiccups so far, Hamilton said, represented “routine challenges for a pilot program affecting thousands of students.” A CCSF informational web page about the Free City program notes that “most of our students are eligible for significant state and federal financial support” and that students are strongly encouraged to apply for them.
Hamilton also noted that “Free City has brought us many new students who are unfamiliar with (or even uninterested in) financial aid. For example, someone who wants to take a pottery class because they heard it is now free is not going to fill out a ninepage FAFSA financial aid form,” referring to the federal form that helps determine a student’s eligibility for financial aid.
Other students with precarious immigration statuses are fearful that filling out detailed financial aid information could expose them to immigration enforcement.
“Students sometimes don’t end up in neat categories that are easy to understand from an accounting/billing standpoint,” Hamilton said.
But the issue is raising concerns for some about the longevity of the Free City program.
Victor Olivieri, who’s running for a City College board seat, called Free City “a great idea that was poorly implemented.” The program, he said, “was designed as a safety net for those students who need it the most, but it was instead turned into a fishing net to get as many people as possible enrolled into City College.”
He’s proposed greater oversight by the college’s trustees and enshrining the Free City program’s funding “by a (legislative) mechanism more stable than a memorandum of understanding.”
The effort to make City College free for San Francisco residents was spearheaded by Supervisor Jane Kim, who has turned it into a showpiece of her mayoral campaign.
Through an aide, Kim said, “We want to be sure students are accessing all resources available to them, and to the extent that is not happening, we will work with City College to make sure it does.”