PEPPER SPRAYING STUDENTS IN SANTA MONICA
By David Bacon
TruthOut, 6/12/12
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9731-pepper-spraying-of-students-in-santa-monica
Today California community colleges
charge $36/unit, a fee due to increase to $46
this summer. Those fees have been the subject of
strong criticism by students and the California
Federation of Teachers since they began rising as
a result of the state's fiscal crisis. Union
leaders and students have shown that as they
increase, the number of students able to afford
community college decreases.
Under the impact of the economic crisis,
Santa Monica College has cut back over 1000
classes in recent years. Its current funding
from the state was reduced by $11 million this
year, and it may lose an additional $5 million
next year.
On April 3, as the board was debating a
proposal from district President Chui Tsang to
institute a system charging much higher fees for
some of the classes offered by the community
college, thirty students and a four-year-old girl
were pepper-sprayed outside the meeting room.
While it wasn't what she expected when
she was elected to the Board of Trustees of Santa
Monica College, it wasn't a surprise to Margaret
Quiñones-Perez. She called it "a wakeup call to
us as an institution that we needed to have a
bigger conversation ... We had to stop and look
and see what was going on."
Starting last year, Tsang proposed that
the 34,000-student college create a non-profit
foundation that would offer core classes, such as
English and math, but charge as much as $200 per
unit. He predicted that despite state
reductions, the college could actually increase
offerings if it began charging a much higher fee
for additional sections of the most popular
classes, once the first set of classes offered at
lower fees was filled. Some district officials
even predicted that the coming winter session
might offer only the higher fee classes.
Tsang and other supporters of the idea
first tried to convince legislators to carry a
bill, AB 515, which would allow the change. Such
legislation would be needed, most believe,
because current state regulations prohibit a
two-tier fee scheme. Paul Feist, a spokesman for
California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack
Scott, has held that higher fees can only be
charged for contract courses geared to the needs
of specific employers. In general, he says,
state law prohibits higher fees for normal, core
classes.
The bill failed in committee, however.
Then Tsang then came to a Santa Monica Board of
Trustees retreat. "I said that I didn't think it
was proper to introduce this proposal in a
meeting that wasn't public," Quiñones-Perez
recalls. "He slipped it in anyway. I felt this
was very disrespectful, and a real problem
because he was trying to get board members'
agreement in a meeting that was not a public
venue. The public anger and frustration when it
finally came out was predictable."
That happened on April 3, when a hundred
students marched from the campus library to a
board meeting, chanting "No cuts, no fees,
education should be free!" When they arrived,
they found the meeting was taking place in a room
that couldn't accommodate a large crowd, and that
people were being given numbers to gain
admittance. As students massed at the doorway,
the chanting changed to "Let us in, let us in!"
Campus security then pepper sprayed the crowd and
manhandled some of the students. About thirty
students suffered the chemical's effects, and two
were taken to the hospital.
Afterwards Tsang blamed the students.
"Although a number of participants at the meeting
engaged in unlawful conduct, Santa Monica College
police personnel exercised restraint," he
asserted later in a statement. "Santa Monica
College regrets that a group of people chose to
disrupt a public meeting in an unlawful manner."
"It's a strange time we are living in
when people who are outraged by social injustice
and the lack of democracy in our schools and
society are seen as the crazy ones," responded
Harrison Wills, student body president in an
internet comment. He wondered "how incredibly
important decisions are made without our
consultation and to top it off in an extremely
small room for a school of 35,000 students."
The real problem, explains
Quinones-Perez, who with student trustee Joshua
Scuteri were the only votes against the proposal,
is that it creates a two-tier educational system
in community colleges. These were the most
important guarantors of the promise in
California's Master Plan that higher education
would be available to every student who wanted
it. "It really creates segregation instead," she
says, "between the haves and the have-nots. If
you can pay, you'll get your classes. That's
guaranteed if you have money. But if you don't
have money, you may get classes, and you may not.
Community colleges were not created for this."
Skyrocketing fees in the state university
and University of California systems have already
frayed the Master Plan badly. UC Berkeley has
turned away thousands of in-state applicants, who
have been replaced by affluent students paying
out-of-state fees making UCB more expensive than
Yale and Princeton. About 30% of the incoming
freshman class of 2011 now pay out-of-state fees
that are $23,000 a year more than in-state
students.
Some Santa Monica College board members
call Tsang's proposal innovative. "They say the
Master Plan is outdated, not in tune with
financial reality and what's feasible,"
Quiñones-Perez charges. "But you don't get to
change the values of what community colleges are
supposed to do. Only the people of California
get to do that." In response to Tsang's
assertion that the change is necessary, and that
students will either have to pay even more to
private college operators or go without classes
entirely, she responds that "we have to be able
to weather the current fiscal storm, work with
legislators, even scale back some. But I've been
on this board for eight years, and the Santa
Monica school board for 12 years before that, and
we've had peaks and valleys in funding all that
time. We will straighten this out as a state,
and we may have to wait, and we may have to see
some pain, but it will be an equalized pain and
an equalized solution."
For Quiñones-Perez, defending the Master
Plan is second nature. Its guarantees enabled
her to get an education that would otherwise have
been far out of reach. She grew up in Stoner
Park, a poor enclave in the middle-class
neighborhoods of west Los Angeles. "My dad came
to the U.S. when there were tobacco and onion
fields in the area. You could still see the
shacks farm workers lived in on Olympic Boulevard
and Sawtelle when I was growing up. That's where
he met my mom, who was born here. They met in
The Lucky U bar -- the local hangout where
Latinos of their generation went to socialize."
Quiñones-Perez was the middle child of
nine brothers and sisters, seven of whom survived
to adulthood. Then her father returned to
Mexico, where he was killed in a horrific car
accident. That left her mom to support the
family.
"She found us a cheap house in a safe
neighborhood, away from the gangs of Venice,
where my older brother was killed,"
Quiñones-Perez remembers. "She worked as a
domestic, and by the time I was eight, I was
going to work with her. At first I thought it
was exciting. I was in big houses, with pretty
things I'd never seen before. But soon I felt
humiliated, washing the bathroom on my knees. I
was embarrassed and ashamed. I didn't understand
why I had to clean other peoples' bathrooms.
When I saw the drapes and carpets in those homes,
I knew I was poor."
In addition, she also began to realize
what it meant to be Mexican in LA. Like many of
her generation, her mother had been punished in
school for speaking Spanish. Although young
Margaret spoke Spanish at home, her mother pushed
her to speak English out in the world. "In the
quietness of my mind," she recalls, "I knew that
if I'd had blonde hair and blue eyes life would
have been better for us. It's not that I didn't
want to be Mexican, but I knew that if you
weren't, you'd have better food and a better
life. So there we were, cleaning houses and
getting food stamps. In back of Safeway I'd meet
Sam, a clerk who'd give us crates of loose grapes
and bruised fruit - what they were throwing away.
For us, that was a treat, like Christmas. My mom
would go to the bakery outlets for the day old
bread and cupcakes. We learned to appreciate the
little things."
In school Quiñones-Perez faced another
barrier. She had auditory problems, and in first
grade her mother signed the papers sending her on
the bus to special education classes. "In those
days they didn't have separate classes for the
blind, or the emotionally disturbed or physically
disabled. We were all lumped together. And for
the next twelve years, that's how I went to
school."
Nevertheless, she graduated from high
school, the first in her family and only one of
her siblings who did. "It was a hard childhood,
but it made me a principled person. I know right
from wrong, I'm very loyal, and I know how to
work hard. But I was taught to hide my
disability, and that I was stupid." That lasted
even when she enrolled in Santa Monica College,
where she got all C's.
But at Santa Monica she discovered the
student organization MEChA - the Movimiento
Estudantil Chicano de Aztlan. The other students
talked to her about going on to a four-year
school, and in the meetings she got her first
exposure to Chicano history and art. "I learned
who I really was," she says, "a Chicana, a woman
of Mexican descent. It gave me a better image of
myself. I wasn't hiding anymore."
When she got to Cal State Dominguez Hills
she stopped hiding her disability also. A
statistics teacher, Barry Rosen, immediately
recognized her problem and helped her find an
educational path that played to her strengths.
She got married, had children, got separated, and
finally completed her BA with the help of the
school's childcare and financial aid programs.
With a stipend from the Minority and Research
Careers program she became a mental health
researcher, which prepared her for the job she's
had ever since - counselor at El Camino College.
She eventually got a masters' degree at the
University of Southern California, and a
doctorate at UCLA.
At El Camino she joined the union right
away. "I've always been a unionista," she
laughs. Today she's first vice-president of the
El Camino Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 1388,
and its political action chair. She mobilizes
members for initiatives like the current tax
reform, while working with local reps. "We've
got very ugly negotiations going on now, and the
district has imposed a contract on us, so we're
likely to have some job actions. But I've
learned over the years that if you don't raise
your voice, nothing will every happen."
For 22 years at El Camino she was also a
single parent, making it necessary to get
additional part time counseling jobs at Cerritos
and Santa Monica Colleges and in migrant
education programs. "But I never left El
Camino," she emphasizes. "A job there was
security for my children - a paycheck and
healthcare." She discovered that her children
had learning disabilities, just as she'd had.
That made her a fighter for them, and other
students like them.
When they became students in Santa
Monica, she ran for the board of education of the
Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District, and
served there 12 years. "No one knew my kids were
at Unified. But I knew that if I wasn't fighting
for them and other students of color, the system
would fail them. There's a stigma to special ed
that makes kids feel vulnerable and different. I
wanted them to feel they could do anything."
After they'd graduated, she ran for the
college district board and won. She looks at the
students from the Pico neighborhood, the poor
barrio of Santa Monica, and thinks, "We can do
better for them." That's one reason why Tsang's
proposal makes her angry. "They just want to
create more classes and sell them at a time when
we aren't looking at the impact on the students
who need us the most. What's the retention rate
for kids of color? What are we doing to get them
through?"
Quiñones-Perez is proud of Santa Monica
College. "We have a wonderful reputation and a
great faculty. Some students take two or three
busses from a long ways away just to come here,
because they believe it will help them get to a
four-year school. But I fear that if they're
coming from poor communities, they'll get locked
out."
That's clearly a fear she shares with the
students who were pepper-sprayed as they tried to
get into the meeting where the decision on their
future was hanging in the balance.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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