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If you want an immediate sense of how long Sacramento City College has been around, consider this: The United States entered into a World War the year after it was founded. The first World War.

Founded in 1916, Sac City, as it’s been affectionately known for more than a century, began life as part of Sacramento High School. The college was founded by Sacramento legend Belle Coolidge (1884-1955), the first woman mayor of Sacramento. In addition to founding the school, she was its first president (though she never used the title). Even so, in the school’s early years, when the college was housed at Sacramento High School, which was then at 18th and K streets (now at 2315 34th St., it’s become a charter rather than public school), she was its only administrator. Cooledge retired from the school after 31 years. 

Albert Garcia has been president of Sac City for about a year-and-a-half and was its interim president for a year before that. But he’s hardly a newcomer to the institution: He taught there since 1991 (English, mainly), which led to his becoming dean of the Language and Literature department. 

“I’ve been here more than half my life,” says Garcia, who’s 61. “I love the history of this college. It gives everything we do here a richer context. Don’t forget, for many years, as far as colleges in the area, we were it. Just as we began by being part of a high school campus” —  in the early days, the campus was known as Sacramento Junior College — “Sacramento State started on this very campus in the late 1940s.”

When the COVID pandemic took over the country, roughly from 2020-2022, Garcia says that people would drive by the normally bustling campus in leafy Land Park, just down the street from the Sacramento Zoo, “and think we’d closed up shop, gone out of business.” This is when, he recalls, Sac City’s entire education model changed. 

“Once the challenge of the epidemic eased, no one was in a hurry to go back to the way things were,” he recalls. Today, most of the school’s administration and the majority of its classes are conducted remotely. “Our students have grown accustomed to learning from home,” he says, “but we still have in-person learning for hard science, including nursing, chemistry and biology.” 

From its inception, Sac City was all about diversity. The school’s first graduating class consisted of only women. “Our diversity is in every area you can think of,” Garcia says, citing the school’s ethnic and racial admixture. “Thirty-two percent of our students are Latino, 10 percent are Black Americans, and we have huge numbers of Pacific Islanders” and other cultures.   

From an initial enrollment of 46 students in 1916 (with 16 part-time instructors), Sac City now has approximately 20,000 students a year, Garcia says, 312 full-time faculty and 295 part-time (adjunct) faculty.

“That number can vary semester to semester depending on how many classes we’re offering, last-minute hiring, and so forth,” he says. “Also, we have 276 classified employees and 30 administrators working at the college.”

As for student numbers, Garcia says, “We did hit a higher peak — 27,000 — during the Great American Recession from about 2008 to 2009. Then we went way down. Now we’re on our way back up.”

Famous alumni include Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle columnist; Jessica Chastain, Academy Award-winning actress; Tani Cantil-Sakauye, 28th Chief Justice of California; and Sherwood “Shakey” Johnson, founder of Shakey’s pizza chain.

“I also want mentioned the internationally famous writer, Joan Didion, whom the college is now celebrating by renaming our Learning Resource Center as the Joan Didion Learning Resource Center in recognition of a major gift from the Didion family and the Sacramento Historical Society,” says Garcia, noting the $500,000 gift. Didion was a student at SCC before going to UC Berkeley.

Among the newer offerings at the school are curricula dealing with the teaching of ethnic studies (“It’s a brand-new department,” Garcia says with evident pride) and optical technology. “That isn’t the same as optometry or ophthalmology,” he clarifies. “It’s about making and fitting glasses and contact lenses.” Asked why this is suddenly a “thing,” Garcia laughs. “It’s a thing because there are lots of jobs in that field,” he says, “and we want our students to gain real employable skills here, even after they head to a four-year college.”

Sac City teaches courses in airline repair and air traffic control at McClellan Business Park, the former U.S. Air Force base. During World War II, the college proved to be a major hub for pilot training (at the base) and tent-housing for soldiers (on the campus). The college has three sites in all: its main headquarters at 3835 Freeport Blvd. as well as satellites in West Sacramento at 1115 West Capitol Ave., and on the campus of UC Davis.

It also has an enduring connection with the arts. In addition to a variety of courses, Sac City is home of the late painter Gregory Kondos’ eponymous gallery, which he established there in the 1970s and ran for many years. 

Garcia is a published poet of three books, his most recent being “A Meal Like That.” He and his wife, Teresa Steinbach-Garcia, a painter, live on a one-acre plot in Wilton where they grow fruit and Spanish varietal wine grapes. The couple has three grown children: Anna, an English teacher; Michael, a viticulturist; and Ben, a college student in San Francisco. 

“What I’d like to have the college seen as, once again, is a vital community asset,” says Garcia. “The pandemic robbed us of some of that luster. We’re working to get it back.”  

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