PCC offers classes at John Muir High School

Share: Starting this spring semester, PCC will offer dual enrollment courses at John Muir High School to allow students to complete college courses while still attending high school. This comes as a result of Gov. Jerry Brown signing Assembly Bill 288 (AB288), establishing the College and Career Access Pathways Act. The dual enrollment program allows high school students and the public to take the college courses offered. This will give people in the area who have no means of traveling to PCC’s main campus the …

New Board of Trustees member(s) elected

Share: Both district board candidates that the PCC Faculty Association have endorsed for the two open Board of Trustees seats are leading in the polls, with one district confirmed and the other too close to call in Tuesday’s election. Author Hoyt Hilsman has usurped the two-term incumbent trustee Bill Thomson for the district four seat, nearly doubling his total votes, 1,414 to 778, marking the first time an incumbent has lost in this district since 1983. “I think the community began to realize what PCC …

Mia Yamamoto on race and gender identity

Share: Born in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, Mia Yamamoto knew oppression from the very beginning of her life. “I was born doing time,” she joked. It would seem that she was destined for her life as a criminal defense attorney due to her passion for working to help those whom the rest of society would have given up on. Mia knows about having people give up on you. Her older brother hasn’t spoken to her going on eight years due to …

Proposition 47 is not guilty

Share: A year ago, California voters passed Proposition 47, an initiative that re-classified certain low-level, non-violent felonies such as drug possession, petty theft, shoplifting, forging or writing bad checks, and stolen property, as misdemeanors. Now, police and prosecutors are linking increases in crime to the proposition. While it is true that there has been an increase in crime, it does not necessarily mean that the proposition is the cause of it. Proposition 47 has a lot of good points and they simply cannot be ignored. …

How to tame a Want Monster

Share: “It’s called the ‘Want Monsters’ and it’s about this boy who has a very big want monster,” Romero said. “It’s an imaginary friend that follows him around. And when the kid wants something, his want monster makes him want it even more. So, he has a cupcake, and Oscar—that’s the name of the want monster, makes him have five more and he gets sick. So throughout the story he learns how to tame him and by the end he becomes a tiny want monster—his …

Doing the crime but not the time

Share: Imagine a world where crimes like child abuse and armed robbery are like a simple slap on the wrist. With Proposition 47 now a state law, that is California’s new reality. Titled “Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties. Initiative Statute.,” Proposition 47 reduces the penalty for certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. It was enacted in hopes of increasing public safety as resources tied to minor misconducts would be freed up, allowing more resources to be allocated towards more dangerous crimes as well as to cut …