Town Hall Convenes at MHCC

[Ed. note: An earlier version of this story published in the May 31 issue of The Advocate misidentified the Town Hall facilitator as Doctor Abio Ayeliya, MHCC Director of Student life and Civic Engagement. He was not present at the meeting. The Advocate apologizes for the error.] 

On May 7, Mt. Hood Community College had its once-a-term Town Hall event – a forum held between the MHCC District Board of Education, our student government members, other Saints students, and anybody else who wanted to show up.

It’s supposed to be a place for you, the students, to voice your concerns and talk about things you wish were changed about our school – a place where anybody’s voice can be heard.

However, this time I do not believe the leadership lived up to that mantra.

After a short opening dialogue, we got introduced to four District Board members present, with more coming in as time elapsed. However, aside from these members, nobody else was introduced.

We heard an overview of the new MHCC “bond” measure effort, an upcoming property tax proposal that’s supposed to appear on our election ballots this November. If passed, it would be the third such bond package Mt. Hood had ever received and would hopefully become a cure-all (raising a projected $131 million) for many of our problems.

After this, one current student opened up with a question if we, as the students, would have any say on where “the bond” money went. The Board’s answers were noncommittal and referenced an earlier survey on proposed bond spending given to students.

We moved on to the first question asked by a student government member – on when we would get food back on campus, stressing both that it needed to be hot food and that it needed to be provided soon.

The Board’s answer to this rang to me as being full of excuses: They commented that contracted vendors didn’t like working at this campus because of how (competitive) nearby off-campus food options are and because we don’t have students living here, in dormitories and such. We then were told that a contractor did agree to serve food but is having problems finding the staff needed to operate.

Further inquiries about a food truck option also did not make it far, as apparently we would need a permanent structure for them on the MHCC campus.

After that, a few questions were asked about increasing the amount of art found on campus and increasing accessibility overall. According to the board, both problems would be solved by “the bond.”

Our new student body president-elect for 2024-25, Dante Sciarratta, posed the next question, asking, What is one thing the board had done over the past year that students would notice? It was an absolute softball question; I even leaned over to the student setting next to me and called Dante a “plant.’

However, the first Board member had no answer and kept on sputtering for a bit then asked a different Board colleague for help. They even started to bring up things that they had done three years ago before finally landing on recent pro-diversity policy changes. I wish I could know why the Board was unable to answer this directly but sadly I reached out to every single Board member and all of them failed to comment.

Another MHCC student then brought up the current situation with Palestine, and noted the fact that we have an Israel flag on our flag wall in the Student Union, but not a Palestinian one. In my opinion the Board’s response to this was half-hearted but I asked him again later and he offered hope on the matter. He even said it seemed like they (Board members) were taking more notes than normal at this Town Hall as he talked.

For the most part, after all this the meeting continued with more of the same, with a wide variety of problems being brought up. And we were again being told that either the Board couldn’t do anything about it, or that the problem was an illness “the bond” could cure.

It seems the Board, in fact, has surprisingly little power over matters. For instance, the subject of our (sometimes) barely functioning toilets on campus was brought up – a problem which the members claimed to have no knowledge of – causing an explosion of different voices from those who had faced similar problems. This discussion got to the point where Andrew Speer, the Board chair, said we had to stop talking about it and that we must move on.

After the meeting ended and we all had some sandwiches, sadly I can’t tell you how the Board felt as the members failed to comment, and I can’t tell you how the student government felt, as they too refused to comment. But I can tell you that the other students felt drained of hope but I’ve been told that some still had hope.

By this time I, too, fail to have hope. It felt like no matter what anybody asked, the answer was always either that it wasn’t the Board’s problem or “the bond” would cure it as it would with all problems.

The proposed bond was the board’s cure-all – but the problem with cure-alls is, they cure nothing.

Izak Lutz