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Officials at the Contra Costa Community College District and Diablo Valley College hosted Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) in campus tours and ceremonies at the college’s San Ramon location this week, as district and local officials, staff and faculty celebrated funding aimed at reducing educational costs for students that was recently secured in Congress.
DeSaulnier was joined by district and school officials during a tour and check presentation ceremony at the DVC-San Ramon Campus on Tuesday, including trustees Andy Li and Rebecca Barrett, along with Interim Chancellor Mojdeh Mehdizadeh and DVC President Susan Lamb, in which he presented officials with a $1 million check for funds aimed at promoting the development of no-cost courses that avoid saddling students with costly, required textbooks.
Supreet Kaur, the district’s student trustee, offered an account of a fellow student at Los Medanos College as an example of the additional pressure textbook costs can place on students, particularly community college students with outside commitments such as full-time work and parenting.
“This student would only buy textbooks if they could not pass the class without it, and they spent countless nights just at the library trying to access these textbooks,” Kaur said. “And it created this bind for the student who was a working mother with three children.”
“These are the stark realities that college students face,” she added.
DeSaulnier told DanvilleSanRamon that the check presentation and celebration by district and campus staff, in the midst of increased governmental scrutiny of Silicon Valley tech companies, offered a refreshing counterexample of how technology can be leveraged for positive change and the bolstering of democratic institutions like education.
“I go back and I talk to Republican and Democratic colleagues from all over the country … and I tell them change can be really good for America,” DeSaulnier said.
“Teddy Roosevelt described California when he first came over here as ‘west of the west’ and this is an example of it — a community college library in California is the epitome of it,” he added.
Tuesday’s ceremony came on the heels of a campus tour with the DeSaulnier, marking his first trip to DVC-San Ramon’s new library, which was unveiled and celebrated as part of the campus’ 15-year anniversary in late 2021.
However, he said he had a keen interest in the development of the San Ramon campus, with deep connections to the city and a hand in the inception of the campus while he was on the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors.
“It’s wonderful to see some of these facilities built up, and to see young people access them for education is reconfirming,” DeSaulnier said.
While welcomed locally during DeSaulnier’s visits to the two DVC campuses this week, the zero-textbook-cost courses developed with the recently secured funding by district faculty will also find their way across the globe, according to Mehdizadeh, who was DeSaulnier’s guest to the State of the Union address on Feb. 7.
“Once our faculty have developed open education content, that content is available to the universe,” Mehdizadeh said. “And so Congressman DeSaulnier, you are supporting our colleges and our community, but really you are supporting the nation and the world.”
DeSaulnier’s DVC visits this week were part of a larger Educational Listening Tour, which was announced by his office on Feb. 9 and aims to solicit feedback from educators, students and administrators on the ground to leverage in DeSaulnier’s congressional work.
Earlier in the day on Tuesday, DeSaulnier visited the Lucille Mauzy School in Alamo, which is run by the Contra Costa County Office of Education and dedicated to serving 75 special education students.
“I had a wonderful time meeting with students, teachers, and parents to talk about how we can best support students with disabilities,” DeSaulnier said on Twitter on Tuesday. “The work here at Mauzy is nothing short of inspiring.”
DeSaulnier said that the focus on education and technology in his district was a source of motivation for his work in congress, with this week’s campus visits throughout his district in particular offering a “national example of how you can have a very diverse population and have this with harmony in a community.”
Editor’s note: DeSaulnier visited Los Medanos College’s Brentwood Center ahead of his visit to DVC-San Ramon, which was reported as a different CCCCD campus in a previous version of this story. Embarcadero Media regrets the error.
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