The state’s community college system is discontinuing a job-training program that has helped thousands of people for more than four decades, but which has dwindled due to budget cuts.

The Employment Training Center program will end operations at the end of the year. It conducts classes at Honolulu and Windward community colleges and at a satellite site in Kalaeloa.

It recently had as many as 1,200 students. But when the state Department of Education and Vocational Rehabilitation Division suffered budget cuts in 2008, the tuition subsidies it provided the center shrank from $375,000 per year to zero.

Enrollment is now about 400 students.

"ETC has a history of about 40 years of service to the community, particularly in Honolulu and in the state at large. We’re sorry to see it go. It’s not something that was an easy decision, but given the fiscal situation, we really had no option," said Doug Dykstra, chancellor of Windward Community College, which administers the program.

For more than 40 years, the program offered a variety of year-round, noncredit, vocational training programs such as auto body repair, culinary arts and office administration technology.

Students from age 16 to their 60s took part, as did at-risk youth, single mothers and displaced airline employees.

The training center’s culinary arts program at Honolulu Community College will shut down at the end of the year, while its counterpart at Windward Community College will close at the end of 2011’s spring semester.

Some programs will continue on the Windward CC campus, but will be administered by the college.

More than 80 percent of the center’s faculty and staff will be kept. Their positions will be redefined or reassigned to different campuses within the University of Hawaii system, Dykstra said.

Director of Vocational and Community Education Bernadette Howard declined to say how many positions will be cut.

Howard said officials are working on a program to address the same student population, but under a different model.

"We’re not abandoning this population," she said.

More than 75 people attended a ceremony yesterday at the Honolulu Community College cafeteria to celebrate the center. Former students, faculty and staff reminisced about how the center served as a steppingstone to help them get where they are today.

Former student Welmore Panen flew from California yesterday to attend the ceremony. He recalled how he first arrived in Honolulu from Manila in the mid-1980s. An engineer, Panen said he had to start over after he immigrated to the United States. He learned about the training center through his sister-in-law, a schoolteacher.

The staff was caring, said Panen, who learned office technology and interview skills. He now works as a project manager for Microsemi Corp., a semiconductor company in California.

"I’m truly grateful to ETC for getting me started," said Panen.

The training center, formerly called the Manpower Training Center, was established in 1964 under an agreement between the federal government and the state. Four years later the center was transferred to the University of Hawaii community college system.