Opinion: Actions Speak Louder

With the rapidly approaching election of student body leaders (Associated Students of Mt. Hood Community College) comes a small handbook of guidelines.

This handbook is full of the morals the college wants candidates to embody and pages to fill out if you want to give it a shot (you should). It also states proudly on the cover, “BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE” – a mantra of good intentions that I believe MHCC has beyond failed to support.

Upon opening the packet, one of the first things you will see is adminstrators’ vision for this school where it declares that Mt. Hood “is a leader in state-of-the-art learning environments and innovation.” This, as a statement, is laughably untrue but then, it’s not: It is their vision, it is the change they wish to see.

But I look around me, and it doesn’t even look like they’re trying.

I walk by cracking walls to a classroom with a piece of paper stuck to another wall that reads in big, bold lettering, “whiteboard here,” a piece of paper has been there for years. As my class break finally comes I go to the restroom where I try three stalls and none of them lock, forcing me to sit down in an unlocked stall hoping things don’t turn out bad.

As your eyes slide down the second page of the election packet you find the administrators say the LIE they barely avoid saying the first time (they say this not as a hope but as a statement: It’s a part of their core themes, the three things that makes this college what it is): “(T)he college provides necessary state-of-the-art tools.”

Just this Winter Term I have watched as a Mt. Hood instructor tried until the end of her class to play a video because workers did not set up the wifi correctly in her classroom. I have sat three days a week in a broken chair. I have scanned a QR code to find out that I would have to walk five buildings away to find drinking water. And I believe we all have had to reconnect our phones to the wifi network all too often.

I can only speak for myself but I do not believe our school has every state-of-the-art tool I need if I have to spend an hour sitting in a broken chair while my teacher fights to be able to successfully teach her own class.

Moving on from what I feel is the nigh-complete failure of Mt. Hood Community College higher-ups to “BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE” is the MHCC student body council, a group that I believe to be doing almost perfect. Their goal is to provide what we students need in order to be happy, suffer lower stress, and to meet each other. I believe that this group is constantly achieving those goals. It mucks up occasionally and probably should have a better understanding of induced demand, but on the recent Valentine’s Day when I watched the student leaders try to deal with the deluge of different people I realized two things: One, I cannot do better, and, two, they are trying the best they can.

The problem I have with the organization is how little the college higher-ups appreciate them. In this candidate packet we are told the exact amount council members are paid for Fall through Spring terms. There are a few X factors, but pay for the Summer Term tells us everything: The president, the highest-paid student council member, earns $600 total, for working 10-15 hours per week for 10 weeks. They are being paid just $6 to $4 per hour – a rate roughly that of the Portland minimum wage in 1991!

This is an elected position you have to put work into just to achieve, only to get where the most- paid position by far (the vice president gets paid 30% less) is ridiculous, where hard real work that often goes without thanks, and you get paid less than half of what you would working part-time elsewhere at minimum wage rates.

The only way the Mt. Hood higher-ups could legally get away with this would be if they don’t consider all of the work the student council puts in to be a “job,” which it most certainly is.

MHCC administrators failed badly with this booklet, with flowery dogma to hide the fact that they are fundamentally failing to achieve the goals they have set out for themselves.