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A FIRST AMENDMENT PUBLICATION
Volume 121 - Issue 5
INSIDE
ROUND OUNDUP
Ironman Instructor..............................................Page 6
Wednesday, Oct. 29 2014
One copy free, each additional copy $1.00
Wi-Fi, cafeteria frustrate Issues not likely to be solved soon Lynn Rosado Sports Editor
Nicolas Heredia / Roundup
Harmony Berg is an actor in the Factory of Nightmares at the Pierce College Farm Center. For more photos on the Halloween Harvest Festival, visit pages 4 & 5.
Farm Center’s decade milestone Andrew Escobar Roundup Reporter
T
he Pierce College Farm Center turned 10 years old this harvest season. In 2005, the Farm Center hosted its first Halloween Harvest Festival. Ten years later, the farm is celebrating its anniversary by doing what it has always done – providing produce, fun, and education to the students and community.
The Farm Center always cuts an environmental message into the corn maze during the Oct. festivities, but this year, the message simply reads “Pierce Farm 10 Years”. Farm Center director Robert McBroom said the farm has come a long way since 2005, when it was just a piece of fallow land. “It started with just selling pumpkins,” McBroom said. “It grew into a farm and developed into a community asset.” McBroom has been in charge of the Farm Center since 2005, after previously running a Halloween show at a Boeing facility in Chatsworth.
While running the Chatsworth show, McBroom met Rocky Young, the president of Pierce College at that time. Eventually, McBroom could no longer host the Halloween show at the Chatsworth location, but Young offered him the chance to organize an event at Pierce. “It started with giving us a chance. We looked at it as an opportunity to continue our Halloween production,” McBroom said. According to McBroom, the first Harvest Festival at Pierce in 2005 was actually an effort to raise money for an “Agricultural Education Center”, which McBroom had
been contracted to develop. The festival was so successful that McBroom’s contract was changed to focus on farming year-round. “The college wanted to make sure that the sustainability of this project was there from the get-go,” McBroom said. “And boy, was it there.” McBroom said that since then, the Farm Center has been a fiscally successful operation that has stressed the importance of educating students and the community on the processes of farming and agriculture. [See HARVEST, pg. 6]
School honored
Pierce granted Leader College status Seth Perlstein News Editor
Pierce College added a feather to its cap when it earned Leader College status from community college success initiative Achieving the Dream. This year’s crop of Leader Colleges totaled 16 schools from 10 states. They obtained the rating because of successful firstyear experience programs. Two other LACCD schools, East Los Angeles College (ELAC) and LA Harbor College, also received the distinction. No other California community colleges secured the title of Leader College in 2014. “It shows that Pierce, Harbor and ELAC are all doing well by our students,” LACCD Board of Trustees president Scott Svonkin
said. “But it is not the end of anything. It’s just a piece of it.” Pierce, ELAC and Harbor earned the Leader College title after they each showed statistical improvement in their first-year success programs. Pierce earned the honor because it increased the ratio of its successful credit-hours completion from 66.3 percent in 2009-2010 to 69.5 percent in 2012-2013, according to Achieving the Dream. ELAC increased developmentaleducation English success rates for first-time college students from 21.8 percent in 2007 to 34.1 percent in 2010. Harbor increased springto-fall persistence rates for all students from 64.6 percent in 20092010 to 69.6 percent in 2012-2013, according to Achieving the Dream. “All of our students are my heroes,” Harbor president Otto Lee
Seth Perlstein / Roundup
Pierce College president Kathleen Burke explains her school’s success with GO Days. Chemical engineering major Erick Valadez waits to speak at the LACCD Achieving the Dream press conference. said. The three schools attended workshops and went through extensive training with Achieving
the Dream before they even implemented their programs. “It’s been a long process,” Svonkin said.
The catalyst for Pierce’s success was GO Days. [See DREAM, pg. 3]
Pierce College faculty and staff articulated diverse opinions about the school’s Wi-Fi connectivity, and its lack of cafeteria vendors. Attitudes ranged from frustration to indifference at the Academic Senate meeting on Oct. 20, in BUS 3200. While Wi-Fi has worked in the Library / Learning Crossroads building, it has been difficult to connect to elsewhere on campus. “It’s a very complicated, frustrating issue for everybody that’s dependent on technology,” Chemistry department chair Isidore Goodman said. Despite the issue’s complexity, Goodman offered a solution to the problem. “Put pressure on your dean to communicate with IT,” Goodman said. “Make sure that IT is aware of these issues.” Computer applications and office technologies professor and Academic Senate treasurer Joe Perret was less inclined toward Goodman’s “peaceful fight for connectivity.” Instead, he urged people to express their frustration to get a resolution. Senators were not much happier about the state of the Library/ Learning Crossroads cafeteria. However, they didn’t have a solution for the cafeteria which has had one vendor since it opened. “There was a study done one year ago with a possibility of a single provider district-wide,” Perret said. “They have to come back to the president with recommendations this semester.” A single, district-wide vendor could spell trouble for some of the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) schools, academic senate president Kathy Oborn said. “If they do bring in this vendor then there’s too much competition,” Oborn said. “And then the schools that have the program will lose the revenue from selling food to the students. Therefore, they will die.” Oborn was not optimistic that the cafeteria would be filled with new vendors in the near future. “So yes, our new, beautiful cafeteria will probably be sitting there for some years until we get to a different place,” Oborn said. Profitability has been an issue in sourcing new cafeteria vendors, Perret said. “I think it is one of those insolvable problems,” Perret said. “The difficulty in solving the problem is that nobody can come in here and provide the service and make money.” The next Academic Senate meeting is on Monday, Nov. 3, at 2:15 p.m. in the Great Hall.
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