Santa Rosa Junior College announced Friday plans to restore up to 500 classes eliminated by persistent budget cuts, enabling students to earn academic degrees and technical education certificates more quickly.

I doubt Stockton, which is facing bankruptcy, another $20 million deficit and a near mutiny of its city workers over attempts to trim pay and benefits, wants to hear that it needs to stop being “a powerful drag on the economy” and start spending.

Hundreds of teachers and their supporters gathered Saturday in Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square, seeking support for public education in the face of looming budget cuts again this year. With the theme “Public Education Strengthens our Community,” about 200 people held signs aloft for drivers, listened to speakers and collected classroom supplies in the event sponsored by the Santa Rosa Teachers Association.

To keep college affordable for all Californians, I am co-authoring legislation with Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez and other Democratic members of the state Assembly to establish the Middle Class Scholarship Act, designed to make college tuition and fees more affordable for middle-income families.

Public education needs more money. It needs to come from multiple sources. We need the state tax increase and quite possibly a local parcel tax.

Sonoma State University’s president told students Thursday to press Gov. Jerry Brown to stop cutting and to restore funding to the state’s public higher education system. ‘This is a self-inflicted wound that will have great repercussions in this state,’ Ruben Armiñana said.

Sonoma State University administrators and faculty leaders met Thursday in what has become a routinely grim process: reviewing the university’s fiscal situation in the face of continued budget cuts. The school now is wrestling with a $4.6 million deficit after temporary state funding cuts of $2.3 million were made permanent in January, officials said.

Officials in Sonoma County’s 40 school districts are sorting through the latest budget wrinkle to come their way — a reversal of a cut to transportation funding but a offsetting decrease in per pupil spending by the state.

Redevelopment agencies in Sonoma County stand to lose more than $17 million over the next 12 months as a result of the state budget passed last week.

‘Single-interest politics is the old politics, and once upon a time, it worked. Now it only gets in the way of recognizing that our world has changed, there will be sacrifice all around, and if we want something, we need to figure out a way to pay for it.’