In a unanimous vote, at the Nov. 19 city council meeting, the Long Beach City Council approved a motion for a partnership with the Long Beach Community College District to provide free, non-credit and certificate courses at the Michelle Obama Neighborhood Library, for a period beginning from Feb. 6, 2020 through May 21, 2021.
According to a City staff report, “this agreement will essentially create a program for a temporary satellite LBCC campus with dedicated space for college classes to be held for residents within the community (Program). This Program is an identified step in the ‘Everyone In’ Plan, approved by the city council, to bring adult education to the north Long Beach area.”
Courses will begin with the Spring semester and will take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am to noon. Each class will take three weeks to complete and may be offered back-to-back over a period of nine weeks. There will be no tuition or textbook costs, according to the report.
Courses are set to be determined in the coming weeks.
In an interview with the Signal Tribune, Cathy De Leon, manager of Branch Libraries at the Long Beach Public Library, said, “We actually don’t have those [courses] on the books yet, we literally have our meeting with the Long Beach City College starting next week, so we’re meeting with them some time early December, so we don’t really have anything formalized yet, we just have the agreement in place.”
There are no costs associated with the non-credit courses of the LBCC Program. The City will provide the use of the Michelle Obama Neighborhood Library facility free of charge to the LBCC. Nominal costs for promotional materials will be absorbed within the Library Services Department’s budget.
