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Mark Wallace, director of public and government relations for Cerritos College, told the Associated Students of Cerritos College Cabinet members Monday that the debate over the California State University service area priority enrollment issue is at a standstill, but advised that the best they can do is to continue to push the issue.

Cerritos College President Linda Lacy and El Camino College President Thomas Fallo will meet with CSU Long Beach President F. King Alexander next week to discuss the issue. If the meeting produces no result, Wallace said the school may appeal for a court decision, or as a last resort, push a bill across the governor’s desk, which would take at least a year.

“We want to solve this issue informally,” Wallace said. “It’s enormously unfair to [Cerritos and El Camino]. This issue is occupying most of my time and I intend to see it through.”

Wallace said Lacy and Fallo have pushed the issue as high as the State University Chancellor’s Office, which in turn said it was a local issue between the community colleges and the CSUs.

The CSUs then said it was an issue for the state chancellor’s office. And now talks are back at the local level.

“They were pointing at each other, which was getting us nowhere,” Wallace said. “We need to have this conversation before we can move forward.”

Cerritos College only falls under a service area for CSU Dominguez Hills, which means fewer students here are transferring to other schools.

“Most students are trying to transfer to Fullerton and Long Beach because they offer the (degrees) that Cerritos College students want,” Mohammad Abbas, commissioner of external affairs for ASCC, said.

Currently, Cerritos College students are required to have a 3.5 grade point average to transfer to CSULB and a 3.7 GPA to transfer to CSU Fullerton. But students within the service areas of the CSUs, including high school students, need only a 2.0 GPA to make the transfer.

“Students are getting penalized for coming to this institution,” Wallace said.

Wallace also said Cerritos College is the second closest community college to CSULB, but the university gives service area priority to three other colleges that are farther away.

The ASCC cabinet has devoted itself to the issue.

“It’s unfair because we are taxpayers and we should have equal rights at state universities,” Abbas, who is a business administration and political science major, said. “Students should be accepted based on academic merit rather than where they go to school.”

Mohammad is the student commissioner in charge of pushing the issue. He said the cabinet plans to present a two-part resolution to address the problem.

“The first part would be about us requesting Cerritos College to be put on the service area priority but if that doesn’t work, we are going try to take the whole (policy) out through legal channels,” he said.