SACRAMENTO “”mdash; This weekend hundreds of University of California students from across the state gathered in Sacramento for an annual conference to learn how to lobby the state legislature on behalf of their peers.
The theme of this year’s conference was “The Price is WRONG: Fund Higher Education, Fund the Future!” Attendees learned about issues including how the UC power structure works and the finer points of how the state budget is approved.
The goals of the conference were to allow student leaders from across the state to network and share ideas.
Conference organizers also aimed to prepare students for today, when they will visit and lobby state lawmakers and hold a rally on the north steps of the capital building, said Tina Park, Undergraduate Students Association Council external vice president and a UC Students Association board member.
Park, who also ran several workshops at the conference, said she enjoyed teaching students about issues such as financial aid and student fees.
“I try to be creative and engaging so students walk away having learned something,” she said.
Vincent Harris, a panelist at the conference and chief of staff for Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, said that though it is good students are pursuing issues that affect them now, they will need to continue their activism after college in order to be effective.
“The key is to not hang up the student activist hat when they graduate, because that’s really when the change is going to come,” he said.
During the conference, student leaders and UCSA staff members helped students prepare for their lobby visits by teaching them about how legislation is drafted and introduced and by rehearsing a set of talking points.
Today groups of students plan to visit legislative staffers, as well as a few members of the state Senate and Assembly, to put their practicing to practical use.
Students will push three points, including another buyout of student fee increases, enhancing Cal Grant B awards, and funding academic outreach programs to K-12 schools at the 2002 level of $33 million.
Students such as Bianca Sparks, a law student, came to the conference to share why the state can be affected by fee increases for undergraduate, graduate-school and professional students.
“I want to show how fees aren’t just an undergrad issue,” she said. “I want to go into public interest law, and I might not be able to afford to pay off all my debt from law school if fees keep rising.”
UC President Robert Dynes released a statement in January saying he supported the proposed state budget, which would increase funding to the UC by 6 percent as well as increase student fees by 7 percent for undergraduates and 10 percent for graduate and professional students.
“We will need to give very careful consideration to the (issue) of student fees. … But overall, in a tight fiscal environment, I believe this budget represents a strong vote of confidence in the work that the University of California is doing for California,” Dynes said in the statement.
Shelley Davis, a panelist at the conference and director of a middle school outreach program called California Gear Up, said student lobbyists should look at student fees historically.
“I think they should include a reflective position that goes back to look at trends in fees,” she said. “It’s scary California is still the best deal in the market, but even so, over the long term the impact (of fee increases) is significant.”
Mark Jimenez, a second-year business economics student, came to the conference to learn about financial aid and how to recruit students to work for a cause.
“The information in the recruitment workshop was obvious, but it was good information and it was good to hear,” he said. “Learning about how the government affects access (to the UC) and how to use the government to enact legislation to affect students was interesting.”