“I will not be running for faculty senate president when my term is up this semester,” said Dennis Falcon during the regular board meeting, Feb. 21.
“I can tell you that the opportunity and the experience to work at an institution like this and have that access and to be able to see the institution from that vantage point… I got to see that for the last three years and I can’t think of a better highlight to go out on.”
He doesn’t intend on retiring yet, the initiatives he’s currently working on include the Culturally Responsive Pedagogy; faculty work together to redesign how they can approach teaching in order to be more adaptive to students and the Zero Textbook Initiative.
Falcon intends on spending his remaining years at Cerritos College teaching in person, “I want to go out teaching students in the classroom because teaching two classes in person, this semester, for the first time basically since covid, there’s nothing like it. Students are amazing,”
Prior to Falcon’s emotional announcement however, representatives of ASCC brought to light issues regarding safety concerns among students and certain parking lots.
“Recently we’ve been hearing concerns from students talking about how they’re not feeling safe at night, especially towards the parking lots,” said Jose Hernandez, vice president of ASCC.
According to Hernandez there aren’t any cameras in the parking lot and at night certain areas of them have very little lighting.
Dante Gaffeild, a member of ASCC also emphasized that “feeling safe is feeling welcomed.” Gaffeild had also spoken with the campus police chief on the safety concerns that some students are currently concerned about.
“We brought up the issue of harassment and he was like ‘oh it’s not a crime, we don’t have to look that much into it, it’s not really our responsibility…’ being a student representative that came off as kind of dismissive to the issues,” said Gaffeild.
Gaffeild doesn’t want people to feel as though their safety concerns won’t be looked at; however, there seems to be issues with certain officers and their lack of concern over dimly lit areas in the parking lots at night.
“The officers say ‘we like the low light, it makes us feel mysterious’ but at the expense of students’ safety, where are their priorities? Are their priorities being ‘mysterious’ and looking cool for their coworkers or is their priority keeping students safe,” Gaffeild said.
According to Gaffeild, there have been instances of people engaging in threatening behavior, “People are coming into Admission and Records and threatening workers.”
“People come here to learn and if they don’t feel safe where they learn then nothing gets done.”
