In Washington State, as elsewhere, demand for job-retraining courses is surging, but leaders at community colleges, which provide the training, say they are having to turn away potential students who cannot pay their own way, The Seattle Times reported.

A state-supported program had paid for up to two years’ worth of tuition and other expenses for people who had lost their jobs, but the $29-million appropriated for the program this year turned out to be not nearly enough, as the state’s unemployment rate nearly doubled over the past year.

At Bellevue Community College, the state’s largest two-year institution, worker-retraining money ran out three weeks ago, Darlene Molsen, the college’s director of work-force education, told the newspaper. The college is telling students to try again in July.

Shoreline Community College ran out of retraining funds in January, and the federal grants and other sources it found to help students were soon depleted, too. “We have no more resources,” said Berta Lloyd, the college’s dean of work-force education.

Jim Crabbe, the director of work-force education at the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, said unemployed people should apply to the colleges anyway, to see if they qualify for other types of aid. But the colleges say most of those programs are likely to be tapped out, too. —Charles Huckabee