THE PIONEER Covering the East Bay community since 1961
California State University, East Bay
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THURSDAY FEBRUARY 11, 2016
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Winter 2016 Issue 6
Students, staff push for all gender bathroom By Louis LaVenture
NEWS AND SPORTS EDITOR For the transgender community, bathroom selection can be tough. Most bathrooms are designated for either men or women; however, Cal State East Bay has started to buck the trend, somewhat. The Diversity and Inclusion Student Center will hold an informative session and play a documentary about the progress of converting bathrooms from men and women to all gender. The meeting is scheduled for 11 a.m. today at the DISC on the Hayward campus. Liam Hawkyard, a transfer student and psychology major who works in the DISC on the Hayward campus, recently surveyed all of the bathrooms on campus and found 16 all gender restrooms. Hawkyard said the fight to add more gender inclusive bathrooms has been going on for years and has been led by faculty like Luz Calvo and Dee Schull. “Most transgender people don’t have the option to use the bathroom safely,” Hawkyard said. “Anytime they use a public facility they are putting their life at risk.” Hawkyard referred to the problem many transgender people face on whether to use the men or women’s restrooms and the issues it can cause with others. According to Hawkyard, the 16 current gender inclusive bathrooms are in “difficult to find areas.” Two bathrooms on the first floor of Meiklejohn Hall were the most recently converted into all gender bathrooms.
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CSU faculty set strike dates
By Louis LaVenture
NEWS AND SPORTS EDITOR For the first time in school history, Cal State East Bay will guarantee admission to any Oakland student that meets the minimum CSU requirements. This comes in collaboration with the Oakland Promise initiative created by Oakland officials, the mayor’s office and Oakland Unified School District. On Jan. 28 CSUEB President Leroy M. Morishita, along with 22 other colleges, signed a declaration of support to the project. Berkeley City College, College of Alameda, Laney College, Merritt College, Mills College, San Francisco State University, University of California Berkeley and the University of San Francisco have also all signed on to guarantee admission spots to qualified Oakland students. “At Cal State East Bay, what we want to do in this promise is we want to offer the opportunity for every student who has worked hard and become eligible to enter our university that we will admit them whether they come directly from the high schools or via the community colleges,” Morishita said. The project has been titled “The Oakland Promise: Cradle to Career” and they mean it literally. Part of the promise is “Brilliant Baby” which will give babies born into poverty in Oakland a $500 college savings account in their name and their parents will be rewarded financially based on their child reaching development milestones. “Brilliant
By Louis LaVenture
Baby” will launch as a pilot in fall 2016 and serve 250 families in the first year. Kindergarten to College is another part of the promise, which by 2020, will provide every Oakland student that enters kindergarten with a college savings account of $100 in their name. The program will begin in the fall of 2016 through a phased approach over three years and expand to charter school in fall 2017. According to multiple city and OUSD officials, the promise program has been in the works for years but recent funding and partnerships like those with CSUEB have allowed it to finally be put into action. According to OUSD,
children of college graduates are three times more likely to go to college. Out of the Oakland students that begin ninth grade in the OUSD, 67 percent graduate high school, 45 percent start college and 10 percent graduate college — something the program is aiming to change. “Too many Oakland students grow up without the hope of going to college,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said. “But
GRAPHIC BY TAM DUONG JR./THE PIONEER
if you grow up knowing that your city has already invested in your education, it provides incredible motivation and shows that college is possible. It’s giving them the resources to go to college and allow every family to know that all of their children can be college bound and
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NEWS AND SPORTS EDITOR America’s largest public university system could come to a standstill if negotiations fall through before April of this year. The California Faculty Association’s board of directors voted Friday to set strike dates for April 13 to 15, 18 and 19. According to President Jennifer Eagan, all 26,000 plus union members will go on strike and picket if the five percent salary increase for 2015-2016 is not met. The CSU’s most recent offer for salary increase to the union was two percent in their budget. According to CSUEB CFA Chapter President Nicholas Baham, “We are still in the fact finding phase. If a deal has not been reached by the time the fact-finding report is issued we will be legally authorized to strike.” The strike would not only include instructors, it would also include counselors, librarians and coaches. This is the second year of a three year contract for union members that includes a 1.6 percent increase in pay system wide. Baham referred to a fact finding panel provided by the union that is scheduled to release its findings in March, however, no matter what the panel finds the union is still authorized to strike. This would be just the second system wide strike for the CSU system and the first since the 1980s. However, in 2011, CSUEB and CSU Dominguez Hills staged a one day work stoppage and strike to protest faculty and staff wages.
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California suspends high school exit exam By Jesse Castro STAFF WRITER
informed faculty that Dance History, an African dance class, beginning and intermediate classes for ballet, as well as Hip Hop Dance and Jazz Dance, would be cut from the Spring Quarter course rotation. The theatre & dance department began to discuss what actions could be taken to bring back the cut courses. “There’s a problem with the value system at the university that’s chipping away
For the last 12 years, California high school students were required to pass all three parts of the California High School Exit Exam to obtain their diploma. That came to an end when Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 172 this past October to suspend the exam for three or more years and allow a new exam to be designed that aligns with the Common Core State Standards adopted by California in 2010. The State Board of Education initially administered the exam in 2003 to ensure students’ competency in reading, writing and mathematics. By 2010, more than 70 percent of students who took the exam passed on their first try. Students answered multiple-choice questions for the math section, which covered algebra, geometry, probability and statistics. The first part of the English section required students to answer multiple-choice questions and the second part required them to write a multi-paragraph essay based on a short prompt. The high school exit exam was initially developed to reflect the academic state standards of that
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PHOTO BY MELODY PLATT/THE PIONEER
CSUEB students dance in protest of classes being cut on Feb. 4 on the Hayward campus.
Students protest removal of classes at CSUEB By Jesse Castro STAFF WRITER
Theatre and dance students from Cal State East Bay protested on campus after the announcement that several required courses were no longer going to be offered in the upcoming 2016 spring quarter. Shortly after the protest on Feb. 4, Eric Kupers, a tenure track dance pro-
fessor at CSUEB, received an email that stated due to an anonymous donation and approval from the Dean of the College of Letters and Social Sciences, the department could transfer funds from within another area of the department to the instructional budget; Beginning Ballet, Beginning Hip Hop and Dance History would be available for spring quarter. Kupers does not believe the email was directly related to the protest. The initial announcement on Jan. 12