“It’s stupid, it doesn’t make any sense. Get your shit together,” Clayton Peters, a Cerritos College student attending Tuesday’s Faculty Senate meeting, which concerned the 2011 summer session, said.

The Cheryl A. Epple Board Room was packed with students and faculty, leaving no seat left unfilled, when a motion was made to restore the original summer session before cuts were made by using reserves to pay for it.

The Faculty Senate voted nine in favor of the motion and nine against it, with four abstaining.

The motion, if approved, would have the Senate take a position of supporting the summer session’s restoration, and would go before the Board of Trustees as a recommendation, with the board making the final decision.

Accounting instructor Michael Farina and economics instructor Solomon Namala challenged the administration with a presentation, with Namala saying that a cash-flow problem is self-imposed.

The presentation suggested, because Cerritos has $36 million in reserves, that the summer session should be restored to help students.

However, some Faculty Senate members, such as Dara Worrel, a representative for the Science, Engineering and Mathematics division, responded to outcries from students by saying that they don’t want to hurt students in the fall and spring sessions as a result of Cerritos’ obligation to not exceed allotted Full-Time Equivalents.

FTES determines how much state funding Cerritos receives and are related to enrollment, because the school must pay for any additional students out of its own budget.

“If we go ahead and we dip into summer, we give more FTES in the summer, does that mean that we’re losing some in fall and spring? In which case, our students are still losing out and that’s the bottom line,” Worrel said.

Senate member Sandy Marks, representing the health occupations division, said that Cerritos must have money in its reserves to meet the current payroll.

“I understand that we’re not going to get money from the state until possibly October, so where is that money going to come to pay salaries?”

Political science major Byron Barahona, just one of the many students who attended, said before the meeting that they were trying to organize a student presence in the Board Room.

“My biggest concern is that we get numbers in here, we get bodies in there,” Barahona said. “With numbers comes power.”

The Board of Trustees will meet for the final time this semester on May 18.