SACRAMENTO - More than 175 students and staff from Santa Rosa Junior College joined thousands of others from across California at the Capitol in Sacramento Monday in a vocal protest and rally against cuts to education.
Organizers planned the “March in March” event to take aim at college fee hikes, reduced class offerings and cuts in programs for lower income and disabled students.
“With the economy like it is, the cuts are just going to continue,” said Amanda Swan, a Santa Rosa Junior College student leader who helped organize the school's contingent traveling to the Capitol.
Among those making the trip from Santa Rosa were students who said they have taken on extra work to meet higher fees, staff who have taken salary cuts or seen vacant positions go unfilled and instructors who've dealt with class sizes that have doubled in the past year.
“Community colleges are supposed to be for people who don't have a lot of money,” said Santa Rosa student Margo Van Venn, 63. Van Venn said she has taken exercise and creative writing classes at the junior college since the early 1980s, but she said recent funding cuts have led to dramatic reductions in the courses offered.
“Students can't get the classes they need to move on,” she said.
The day began at 6:30 a.m. for the Santa Rosa group as participants gathered in the junior college's Lawrence Bertolini Student Services Center, where they picked up blue and red armbands, hand-written protest signs and bag lunches.
Five buses were paid for by the local SEIU, which represents some campus workers, and the All Faculty Association, made up of instructors, to take supporters on the two-hour bus trip to the Capitol.
The rally itself was organized by the Student Senate for California Community Colleges and the California State Student Association and began with a high-spirited 20-minute march from Raley Field to the Capitol.
Students took in nearly two hours of speeches from student and state education leaders, and a half-dozen state legislators.
Some speeches directly tackled the state's difficult spending choices.
Assembly majority leader Alberto Torrico, D-Fremont, took aim at the state's multibillion dollar spending on prisons, saying more money needed to go to schools.
“Instead of opening our doors to college education, we're closing (doors) every day,” Torrico said.
Most remarks to the crowd, which organizers estimated at about 7,000 to 9,000 were fired-up calls to action, tailored to a younger generation of voters.
At one point, a student leader asked audience members to take out their cell phones and send a text message opposing further funding cuts to an allied student group, a sort of impromptu digital petition drive to support the day's campaign.
At another point, a student speaker from California State University Dominguez Hills brought popular culture into the crowd's chants to lawmakers.
“In the famous words of (rapper) Ludacris, if you can't do the job, ‘Move! Move! Move out the way!'” she said.
The audience erupted in an echo: “Move! Move! Move out the way!”
Later, Swan, the Santa Rosa Junior College student leader, urged the crowd on with her own impassioned speech from the Capitol steps.
“How many of you are working two jobs or more to put yourself through college?” she asked. Many students nodded or shouted out in affirmation.
“Sacramento, are you listening? We are here now and we're not going away!” she said.
Several Santa Rosa students said the day made them hopeful about their ability to lobby for more state support of higher education.
“I'm really happy with the way this all worked out,” said Karla Lara, 19, a psychology student from Rohnert Park. She carried a Spanish-language sign that read “La educación es un derecho humano.” Education is a human right.
Santa Rosa Junior College adjunct instructor Dan Walsh joined students at the rally. He said he recently took a 10 percent pay cut and has seen one class, an introductory environmental course, shoot from 40 students to 80 this year.
“It's hard not to be frustrated,” Walsh said. “Our connection to the students has been minimized (by the cuts)...and for them trying to graduate on time is really difficult.”
“I'm just hoping this (demonstration) ripples out,” he said. “It's a conversation that needs to continue.”
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