“That just didn’t happen,” Carlson said. “Some were able to stay, and some were not.” Her office at Cerro Coso, a trailer that abuts the local school, is at the epicenter of the prison closures, fielding calls and sorting files from students and professors who are frantic or frustrated.
Others dropped out of school even before they were transferred, said Fulks, resulting in an enrollment dip before the spring semester, right as news got out about the prison closures. The corrections department said in a statement that it is committed to preventing prison transfers during the semester, but that it does happen.
While the corrections department later clarified that it tracks where it moves each prisoner, administrators at two community colleges told CalMatters that they don’t have access to that information and said there’s no coordinated system among community colleges to communicate which students have transferred where.
Palo Verde College expects to lose about 10 percent of its student body — about 520 people — when nearby Chuckawalla Valley State Prison closes in 2025, but President Don Wallace said the college can easily make up the lost enrollment by gaining correspondence-based students from other colleges around the state.
To Fulks at Cerro Coso, who recently defended a dissertation about prison education, the difference in prison between in-person instruction and correspondence-based classes is stark. “Correspondence success rates are extremely low, about 68 percent compared to face-to-face, which was about 81.6 percent,” he said, adding that the performance for correspondence classes may be even lower since some of the remote classes he studied had professors stop by occasionally.
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