The California State Student Association will try to change a proposed 10 percent tuition increase for the CSU system with a rally on April 21.
The announcement was made by Dina Cervantes, A.S. Legislative Affairs director, at the A.S. Senate meeting on March 4.
The date of the rally is being named a statewide day of action for junior colleges, University of California and CSU schools, said Cervantes.
“April 21st?it’s going to be something monumental?this is going to be very huge in the state of California, especially in the fiscal situation we are now,” said Cervantes.
The proposed 10 percent increase can go up to 25 percent if students don’t do anything, said Cervantes.
To resolve the proposed tuition increase Cervantes told A.S. senators to get 50 signatures by April 21 on the Tuition Relief Now campaign petition.
TRF is an organization made of students and parents from California who want all students to be able to afford college.
If 25 to 35 senators acquired the 50 signatures for the petition, it would be a total of 1,250 to 1,750 signatures, said Cervantes.
If the petition is taken into consideration it would freeze tuition increase for five years, and after the five years raise it only 2 percent every year, she said.
“Two percent is better than 10 percent or potential 25 percent,” said Cervantes.
The senate then moved on to fund allocations for the various clubs, organizations and departments on campus.
The senate allocated $4,300 to the psychology department’s Western Psychology Association Convention on April 10 to 13.
The amount would be equally divided among the 43 students attending the event.
Psychology students asked for a fund increase from the senate at the open forum.
“Our psychology department is one of the best in the nation as they were pointing out, and is probably the reason why they have received funding from us,” said Sen. Byron Baba, a business and economics major.
The decision was debated by senators and the initial amount of $1,600 was raised to $4,300.
“If you were to have approved the $1,600 recommendation?it would be about 28 percent of the overall allocation for the current year,” said General Manager David Crandall.
Vice President Josh Hansen discussed his problem with the allocation, “More than a quarter of our (Academically Related Reserves Account) seems like a lot and I would just like to give this money to the most amount of people that we can and limiting this to one specific area doesn’t seem fair to me,” he said.
The first allocation was $1,600 for 52 students in order for them to attend the convention but nine became ineligible, said Baba.
Baba was the first senator to propose an increased allocation, bring the total to $3,440, with $80 designated for each student.
Nicole Umali, social and behavioral science senator, proposed another increase, giving each student $150, creating a total of $6,450. Lynch said that would be one-third of the ARRA budget.
That proposed amount was not carried. Neither was the proposed $4,500 for 30 students by Lynch.
The psychology department also requested an allocation of $320 for each of the five students attending American Psychology-Law Society Conference this weekend.
Other students also requested funding at the open forum.
The renovation of the A.S. Recreation sports office, which was originally allocated $25,000, asked to decrease the amount to $23,000.
MEChA was approved a $750 increase in funding, raising the amount to $3,750 in order to cover registration sign-ups for the 10th Annual Raza Youth Conference.
