Merced College’s Los Banos Campus opened in 1971 with great expectations

This is first of a series about the Los Banos Campus of Merced College, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a campus festival on Nov. 5, 2021, to which the entire community is invited. This article narrates the campus’s first ten years.

In 1970 Merced College decided it was time to open a full-time campus in Los Banos. College president Lowell Barker named evening dean Ted McVey to be the first campus dean and directed him to get a facility ready to open for classes in September 1971.

Previously, Merced College had offered courses in Los Banos in the evening but never during the day. A full-time campus would give Los Banosans who had previously traveled 40 miles to Merced the chance to take a full load of general education transfer classes in their hometown.

McVey and Barker met with Los Banos school and community leaders, including Joe Cox, who encouraged them to move forward with their plan. McVey found a perfect building to rent, which had been used by the Bureau of Reclamation when the San Luis Dam was built west of the city.

McVey directed extensive renovation of the building while hiring five full-time faculty members, a secretary, a bookstore clerk and a library clerk. Classes at the campus indeed began in September 1971. The local community (population: 10,000) responded with more than 400 students enrolling in day and evening courses.

Enrollment continued to build, and Merced College, again working with local school and community leaders, put a measure on the ballot in 1973 whereby persons living within the Los Banos and Dos Palos Unified School District could vote to join the Merced Community College District. Previously Los Banos and Dos Palos were in an “open” district, with no affiliation to an existing college. The measure easily passed.

Enrollment increased and classes were added. Two metal buildings on the ground were converted to an auto shop and an art studio. The campus drew not only graduating high school seniors but many adults from both Los Banos and Dos Palos who had previously believed college courses were not accessible to them.

The campus had its own student government, which sponsored many activities and events. The campus offered a wide range of physical education courses, including tennis classes which during one semester drew more than a hundred students in day and evening classes, held on the Colorado Avenue courts, which the college, working with the City of Los Banos, helped finance.

Courses, activities and events continued to expand until the fall of 1978, the first semester after the passage of California Proposition 13, which lowered property tax rates and reduced Merced College’s revenue, in both Merced and Los Banos, substantially.

A new college president started a process of downsizing the campus. McVey and three faculty full-time faculty members were reassigned to Merced, leaving the college with no full-time dean and only three full-time faculty. Class schedules were reduced, and enrollment started to decline. There was talk that as soon as the lease on the rented facility ended in 1981, the campus would be abandoned.

Community leaders in Los Banos came together and asserted that it would be unfair and unwise to close the campus. Local elected officials put significant pressure on the college board of trustees to keep it open. Then, in early 1980 local developer Richard Menezes donated 10 acres of land adjacent to Merced Springs Road for the building of a new campus. The City of Los Banos agreed to extend water and sewer services to the site.

The college president and board agreed to move forward with a plan to install modular buildings on the property and open the new campus in Fall 1981 when the lease on the L Street building ended. However, delays in preparing the ground and in building the modular buildings delayed that schedule by a year.

In the fall of 1981 there was no building in which to hold classes. The lease on the rented building had ended. The new building wasn’t ready. The college decided to rent spaces in variety of places during the day and offer night classes at the Los Banos High School.

An office was set up in the city’s recreation building in Talbot Park and classes were taught in various storefronts in the city, as well as in the Red Cross Building at the Los Banos Fairgrounds. Somehow the Los Banos Campus of Merced College survived.

This story was originally published September 13, 2021 at 8:54 AM.