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The
Skyline View The Voice of Skyline College, San Bruno, California
Volume XXXIV - Issue 2
February 12, 2015
Campus enjoys faculty art
www.theskylineview.com
Skyline Theater faces asbestos concerns By Laurel B. Lujan TSV Staff writer
Erin Perry/The Skyline View
Professor Amir Eafahani (right), and student, Angela Yuen (left), view one of Eafahani’s pieces at the faculty exhibition at the Skyline Gallery.
Students were alerted to the school’s recent theater closure on Jan. 30. A public email was sent out by Skyline President Dr. Regina Stanback Stroud informing the school community of the closure of the Skyline Theater. It was due to the reports that the theater equipment may contain asbestos. Affected groups like theater cast, dancers, and other scheduled events and performers are already being collaborated with in case the theater tests positive for the hazardous material. Events are either being moved to other facilities, postponed or cancelled, depending on the group’s decision, Interim Marketing Director Jennifer Owen-Blackmon said in response to the possibility of the theater closing. According to Owen-Blackmon, the theater is open in between construction and is safe to enter. The light fixtures and cables have been removed in order to be tested, but have been put back and the cabling is being redone. “We are trying to be proactive and trying to figure out some events that are happening in the future,” Owen-Blackmon said. “Those people (the drama depart-
ment) are obviously aware of the possibility that the theater might not be open, but no, we are absolutely not waiting. We are going to work with everybody that is involved with these plans so that there is a place that they will do their events. We are hopeful that the tests are going to be okay and that everything goes as planned.” Theater manager Joshua Harris and Dean of Social Science/Creative Arts Donna Bestock have chosen not to comment. What this means for Skyline is that It depends on the testing that is to be done. “The first priority is safety, so if there is asbestos, we’ll abate it and won’t expose the faculty, staff or community to it,” Stroud said. “I have confidence that we’ll go through the proper processes. This district has been engaged in construction and modernization and those kinds of things, so our team knows what it’s doing when it comes to that stuff.” “Once, the work is completed, it will be fully open and available for events,” Owen-Blackmon said. The theater was built in 1969 and has not had significant changes for 46 years. Skyline is receiving about $100 million to remodel the theater and to build a social science/creative arts complex that includes social sciences and technology.
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CSU adds success fees for some campuses by Max Maller
TSV Staff writer
California State University students will be charged additional fees alongside their regular tuition and costs at 12 of the system’s 23
Max Maller/The Skyline View
Kylee Wong, a student at CSU East Bay, says she is against the additional fees
campuses. Internal CSU documents refer to these fees, which range from fifty to nearly a thousand dollars, as “Category II campus mandatory fees.” However, they are better known as “student success fees,” a name that lends hopeful overtones to a policy that many see as a crafty way of simply raising tuition. In January, Gov. Jerry Brown promised to keep annual CSU tuition static at $5,472 for a third consecutive year. In return, he allocated $142.2 million in general fund revenues for the CSU system in 2015, a 4% increase over last year’s budget. The new fees went into effect late last year, when CSU chancellor Timothy P. White instituted them unilaterally. White
did not seek any prior student referendum, a decision he defended in a policy revision released late January, citing “significant reductions in state financial support to the CSU and individual campus needs.” Only one CSU campus held an open, campus-wide vote on the proposed fees prior to their implementation. A second campus did not support such a vote, but instead held a smaller committee vote, which rejected the fees and was ignored by the administration. A presentation by White to the CSU Board of Trustees on September 9, 2014, notes that there is indeed “no formal notification process to the board regarding campus discussions related to” the fees. “I’m pretty against it,” Kylee Wong, a communications major
and former editor-in-chief of the CSU East Bay campus newspaper, ‘The Pioneer,’ said. “Education could be free if we wanted it to be.” Wong considers herself an “anomaly” among her fellow students, few of whom even know the fees exist. “I read about it a lot and listen to the news a lot,” she said. “Students are not really willing to find the information. And I think that’s because college is temporary in our minds; it’s not really something we invest a lot of time into learning about.” CSU East Bay is one of the dozen CSU campuses affected by the new ordinance. Students pay an average of $240 extra, or 4% of their annual contribution. This is still lower than the highest pay-
ing campuses, including CSU San Luis Obispo, where the average fee increase has been $780, almost ten percent of the total student cost. Several student groups have organized protests around the fees, notably at the Cal State Northridge campus. However, it seems that information has been slow to reach students through the usual administrative channels. When asked about the fees, many CSUEB students said they were unaware of any recent increases. Representatives in student government, who also had never heard of “student success fees,” gave flustered responses to general budgetary questions. I have my own ideas about what
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