WEEKLY PRINT EDITION
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2017 – TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 2017 VOLUME 103, ISSUE 28
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY’S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWS SOURCE SINCE 1913
W W W . T H E D A I LYA Z T E C . C O M
CSU Trustees to vote on $270 tuition increase ADRIANA MILLAR ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR ____________________________
LEFT: Ahkeel Whitehead running in an Aztecs Adaptive Sports event. RIGHT: Whitehead with the Aztecs Adaptive Sports club. COURTESY OF TOMOKO BURKE
Aztec Paralympian pushes for change AUSTIN GAYLE ASST. SPORTS EDITOR ____________________________ Football sat atop Ahkeel Whitehead’s list of priorities during his years at Chula Vista Middle School, a list also loaded with other sports as complex as basketball and as simple as tag. With aspirations to play football at the collegiate level, Whitehead committed a majority of his time to refining his craft on the gridiron and competing with his childhood best friend Raymond Holden to inch closer to becoming an elite football player. Together,
Whitehead and Holden pushed each other up the ranks to become two of the most successful, competitive players on the Chiefs, a San Diego youth football team. Trending up as he entered the summer before his high school debut, Whitehead suffered an injury playing the sport he so dearly loved that ultimately landed him in the hospital, a misfortune that would change his life forever. Concerned with their son’s health, Whitehead’s parents, Chris and Glady Whitehead, finally told their son after nearly 14 years that he had hemiplegia cerebral palsy.
A whirlwind of emotions swirled through Whitehead’s mind, none of which were disappointment. “When they told me, it was a big moment, but it wasn’t big in the sense that I was disappointed to hear it,” Whitehead said. Whitehead emphasized that the news provided more clarity than despair, for he now understood why he couldn’t hold his balance at times or why it was so hard to hold anything with his left hand. The nature of Whitehead’s
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The CSU Board of Trustees will vote whether to raise tuition by $270 per academic year today, March 22. In January, Governor Jerry Brown released the first draft of the 2017-2018 state budget, which included a $157.2 million increase in funding, which is $167.7 million less than CSU trustees requested. The Trustees originally asked for additional state funding of $324.9 million to meet its graduation rate goals, offer more courses, hire more faculty and provide additional academic and student support services, according to the March 2017 CSU budget update. To cover this shortfall, CSU trustees are voting on a tuition increase of $270 for resident undergraduates, raising the cost of tuition to $5,742. According to the CSU budget update, similar adjustments are proposed for non-resident tuition, as well as graduate, doctoral and teacher credential programs. The potential increase will create an additional $77.5 million of net revenue, one-
third of which would be set aside for student financial aid, according to the CSU budget update. “This revenue would go to student success initiatives and CSU campuses would be able to hire approximately 400 new faculty members and offer an additional 3,000 of the most highly demanded courses,” the budget update states. The proposed increase would not affect the CSU’s neediest students, according to the budget update. Most CSU students with household incomes below $70,000 rely on financial aid to pay for tuition, according to the update. It says in 2015-16 nearly 63 percent of all undergraduates — more than 255,000 students — had their tuition fully covered by grants or waivers, which do not need to be repaid. If enacted, the tuition raise will be the first since the 20102011 school year. According to the CSU budget update, the CSU will also engage in advocacy efforts leading up to the state’s final budget decisions. CSU Public Affairs Manager Elizabeth Chapin said the
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Love Library not up to earthquake code ANDREA LOPEZ-VILLAFAÑA MUNDO AZTECA EDITOR ____________________________ Malcolm M. Love Library at San Diego State is overdue for seismic retrofitting, renovations which would make the building more resilient to seismic activity from earthquakes, but will not be renovated any time soon due to a lack of state funding. The campus library does not sit on a fault zone, but the closest major fault near the university which could produce a magnitude seven earthquake is Rose Canyon, which has not fractured in 300 years. The California State University Seismic Review Board is responsible for identifying facilities considered potentially hazardous in two systemwide lists: Priority 1 which identifies buildings that need “urgent attention” and Priority 2 which identifies buildings that need “special
attention.” The CSU Seismic Retrofit Priority Listings for 2016 identify the Love Library as a Priority 1 facility that is in need of “urgent attention for seismic upgrade as soon as resources can be made available.” The library has been on the Priority 1 list since 2010. A recent study found that the Rose Canyon fault is actually a continuous fault zone to the Newport-Inglewood fault. Valerie Sahakian, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological survey and the study’s lead author, said the amount of shaking depends size of an earthquake and seismic retrofitting intends to reduce the amount of damage. Associate Vice President of Real Estate, Planning and Development at San Diego State Robert Schulz said the library will not be renovated anytime soon because projects like seismic retrofitting are no longer funded by the state. Governor Jerry Brown
eliminated capital funding for projects separate from the general fund budget, which paid for projects such as seismic retrofitting. According to CSU Seismic policy, the Review Board was created in 1992 as a result of a policy adoption by the CSU Board of Trustees that aimed to set a standard for existing buildings to provide “reasonable life-safety protection.” The Review Board, made up of external engineers, increased the ground motion standards and told the university to consider renovation of the Love Library, Schulz said. Standards set for Humboldt State University, which sits on Mendocino Triple Junction, a location where three plate boundaries meet and can produce “mind boggling” epic earthquakes, can not compare to San Diego, Schulz said. “They would like the design to take a higher level of lateral loading when the
Students walk outside the Malcom M. Love Library on Tuesday, March 21 KELLY SMILEY, PHOTO EDITOR
ground shakes so it would be reinforcing the shear wall structures that underlay the basement,” he said. California building codes are adopted every three years meaning buildings, like the Love Library that was built 46 years ago, were built to different
codes. A building that does not meet current state building codes does not mean it is unsafe it just means the codes were different when it was built, Schulz said.
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