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To the delegates of the 2022 Community College National Legislative Summit:
Dear colleagues, friends and, of course detractors,
Roar. Next week at the 2022 Annual Community College Summit, please roar. Make sure both sides of Capitol Hill know you are all there.
In spite of COVID and excruciating years of hungry, homeless students and exhausted faculty and staff, you have shown up. God bless you, everyone.
Roar.
You are 720 individuals from 40 states, including Washington, D.C., and the Northern Mariana Islands and at least 300 institutions, according to your host, the Association of Community College Trustees. As we encourage our students, take the best you think you can accomplish in Washington next week. Triple that.
Please, roar. Roar next at every U.S. senator, every member of Congress. The situation for hungry and homeless community college students who dropped out due to COVID is a shameful national disaster in the United States—Trump, COVID or not. Roar and do not let this be another year when you return home with less than the funding you need for a 90 percent completion rate. If you don’t try?
State the facts. Start with spending per student. Your 6.8 million students—first generation, single parents, working, Pell Grants, food stamps, often nothing to eat that day—barely have a prayer of success. Start aiming at the bull’s-eye. Average per-student spending—heat, lights, salaries—is $16,000 per student. Roar?! What’s the spending per student at the public schools where your children, where members of congress send their children? Often $25,000 and more. Start there with Congress next week. For once, at last, with numbers, with accountability demand $25,000 per-student spending.
“But Wick, that would mean rethinking local, state and federal tax policy.” OK. Better get going.
Next is hunger. Then hunger. Then hunger. In your roars, bring the shame to Congress. Bring every member the K-12 federal free/reduced-price lunch percentage. Major cities, Boston, New York and more—often 70 percent. Every one of us knows there are millions of students who may have nothing to eat on weekends, holidays, vacation. In the U.S. in the 21st century. Scream, don’t roar.
Do not leave town next week without an enacted national plan to feed those children starting March 1, 2022. Community college completion success starts with eliminating hunger in K-12. The hunger situation is scary to face. Crazy. At Bunker Hill Community College, a colleague learned not to ask a student, “Are you hungry?” “No” is always the answer. We learned to ask, “Have you had anything to eat today?” Please roar to Congress that this is happening every day in your colleges, in their districts.
Less than a roar next week? Nothing will change.
Along with all of you, I have watched for decades as federal policies punish community college students, faculty and staff. How much roaring is enough? I don’t know, either.
With those numbers of you at the summit next week? High-five each other, roar again and declare that you are not going home until you have the votes lined up with the names of the members of Congress who agreed to vote yes by name. Have personal cellphone numbers of the senators and members of Congress. Demand a vote date for every item on your legislative agenda. Then, all of you, telephone and email those members of Congress and senators every day until the successful vote. Give the list by state delegation to your faculty, students and staff and have them do the same.
For decades, too, I have heard community college leaders resign themselves to no hope for real funding, state or federal. Community college leaders have slammed me for suggesting that community colleges will not have more funding until they/we define what we need with accountable budgets.
Clobber me again: this is lazy. Money is not the answer. Failure to define the needs of these 6.8 million students? I admit I would not give my beloved Bunker Hill Community College $25,000 a student starting tomorrow. Only after I see an accountable plan for leaps ahead in completion.
Who is an obscure columnist to make such declarations? Here’s what I know. A few of us, in 2010, looked harder and began to understand the extent of hunger at Bunker Hill Community College. Everyone agreed that K-12 students needed nutrition to succeed. We could not find any data on college students. We observed that K-12 free lunch students lost lunch and often a bus pass when they continued to community college. “That’s a really important insight,” a national higher education expert on low-income access told me.
I wrote about hunger. State and local officials slammed the doors. Sadly, the AACC and ACCT then, too. A friend at the American Council on Education proposed that we ask for a federal Government Accountability Office study on college student hunger. We asked Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, for help. This took years. The GAO issued the report in 2018 showing that college student hunger and homelessness was a crisis.
In 2022? We still have to far to go.
My point? Roar next week. If one obscure columnist from a windowless basement office in a community college can start the ball rolling from ridicule to a federal GAO study to federal legislation and, at last, some grants—tiny but a start from the federal Department of Education?
Imagine what 720 of you can do next week. Roar.
