CUESTA - A new nursing program at Cuesta College that enables local students to earn a four-year degree may be disbanded at the end of its first year.

"If we don't get enough people to enroll in it, we're not going to be able to keep it," said Mary Parker, director of Cuesta's nursing program.

Six students are currently enrolled in the bachelor's degree program and the college needs about 15 to sign up this fall in order to continue, Parker said.

Through a partnership with CSU Dominguez Hills in Carson, Cuesta revived a program last fall that died a decade ago. It enables students to earn a bachelor's of science degree in nursing.

Dominguez Hills provides the teachers, and Cuesta provides the classroom and pays the teachers with money from a state grant, which requires more students to maintain funding. The college had a similar program from 1982 to 1995, Parker said, but it closed due to the same scenario -- a lack of students.

The program is designed for graduates of Cuesta's two-year, associate of arts degree program in nursing, said Nicki Edwards, an instructor in the program who is also the chief nursing officer at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo. The two-year program enrolls 46 new students each fall.

Parker is concerned that losing the program could not only exacerbate a local nursing shortage, but it could hamper the college's plan to enlarge its two-year degree program in 2005.

She and Edwards both said having a bachelor's program can help provide future nursing teachers. If they go on to earn master's degrees, the college could hire them as instructors for an expanded two-year program.

"That's why all of us as a community ... have a very vested interest in the Cuesta nursing program," Parker said.

In agreement is Ed Kirkpatrick, Edwards' counterpart at French Hospital Medical Center and the Arroyo Grande Community Hospital. He pointed out that all the local hospitals offer tuition reimbursement for their nurses to encourage them to take additional college course work.

"It's a valuable program," he said. "We want them to stay."

While a two-year degree is enough for many nurses' responsibilities, Edwards said, new challenges are arising from health care's growing complexity caused by new technology, new medical developments and better-informed patients.

"We need nursing staff with this kind of advanced education to keep up with all this," she said.

Whether Cuesta's four-year degree program survives or not, Edwards said, it will have little effect on a new state law mandating nurse-to-patient ratios in nearly all hospital departments.

That's because the students in the bachelor's program are already working locally as nurses, so the program isn't adding new nurses to the area, Edwards said, it's just giving them more training. She estimated that fewer than one-third of the hospital's bed-side nurses have bachelor's degrees.