FULLERTON : College Students to Fight Fee Hike Plan

Students at Fullerton College are developing politically sophisticated lobbying tactics to battle Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposed tripling of class fees to $30 each unit.

Today, 24 students in the 38-member Associated Students Senate will fly to Sacramento for a day of lobbying.

They will break into small groups and meet for 15 minutes each with Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), an aide for Speaker Willie Brown and 28 other legislators or their aides.

“We’re going to attack them at their game,” said Cris Peirano, vice president of the student senate and an organizer of the trip.

Peirano and other students have researched the legislators’ positions and created computer files which they will update when they return. They say they will send smaller delegations to Sacramento each month until the final budget is approved.

The trip will cost a little more than $4,000, which comes out of the Associated Students government budget. Fullerton College students have traveled to Sacramento before to lobby, but this is the largest and most expensive trip, according to student leaders and college staff.

Students said the personal lobbying will be more effective than holding rallies. Some college campuses erupted with rallies and marches last year as word of the fee hike from $6 to $10 per credit spread.

Caroline M. Alonzo, a 19-year-old biology student who will go on the trip, said a rally doesn’t impress legislators. “That doesn’t really get anywhere,” she said. “They just see these kids and say, ‘Get a job.’ ”

Lobbyists who work in Sacramento agree.

“If you want to get your message across on a large scale, this is the place to be,” said Arnold Bray, lobbyist for the Assn. of Community College Administrators.

Marlene Garcia, assistant to Brown, said: “It shows that the students are very organized and very concerned just to come to Sacramento.”

Bray said the Fullerton group is the largest lobbying delegation from a single college that he knows of. “The other colleges send one or two students at best,” he said.

Most community colleges rely on lobbying by students in the California Student Assn. of Community Colleges.

Doug Morrow, the association’s president, said he has been lobbying in Sacramento a day or two each week recently. Morrow, a student at Los Angeles Valley College, said he admires the Fullerton effort. “From one college, that’s great,” he said. “We hope other student organizations follow Fullerton’s example.”

Student governments in the University of California and California State University systems have paid lobbyists who work in Sacramento, Morrow said. The community college student association is without one and that makes it important for community college students to travel to the capital and lobby in person, Morrow said.

“The governor’s kind of drawn the line in the sand for us,” Morrow said. “Now is the time for students to get mobilized.”

Peirano and fellow student Joseph Hong went to the political library at UCLA to research the legislators. They have distributed profiles to the other students and a list of key points they want to make in their brief meetings in Sacramento.

The students met twice to plan their presentations. They will remind legislators that many of the 1.5 million community college students are studying in vocational programs that will put them back in the work force.

Community colleges train workers who could help revive the California economy, the students plan to say.