The San Jose State Associated Students Board of Directors approved $2,000 for free menstrual product supplies and discussed Assembly Bill 1460 which would create an ethnic studies units graduation requirement at last Wednesday’s meeting.
Menstrual product initiative
Since Fall 2019, Floriberta Sario, A.S. director of business affairs, has said she wanted to establish a budget for free menstrual products to be available in all Student Union women’s restrooms.
During Wednesday’s meeting, the board approved $2,000 for the initiative, which will come from the A.S. special projects budget.
“The reason why we chose to do it [in the Student Union] is because it’s a central location, like whatever major you are, you’re bound to come in at some point,” Sario said.
Sario said she hopes that the free menstrual product initiative for the Student Union will provide help for a wide group of students.
“I don’t want students to not know where to go because often times it’s a freshman or transfer or a commuter student who is not as involved as somebody else,” she said.
Sario said some students may not want to express their financial insecurity as it puts them in a vulnerable position.
“Women shouldn’t have to struggle for the fact that they are women, so that’s what I was able to provide,” Sario said. “At the end of the day I am on this board to serve the students and I think that I’m doing [that] with this project, and so that always is very rewarding to me.”
She said the bathroom dispensers’ payment system will be replaced with an A.S. sticker so that students don’t have to pay and can easily access the resources.
These products will be available to any person using the women’s bathrooms in the Student Union. A.S. plans to launch the project in April.
Ethnic studies bill
Director of Academic Affairs Anoop Kaur updated the board on the status of Assembly Bill 1460 which will require undergraduate students who graduate in the 2024-25 academic year to take an ethnic studies class.
Kaur said she supports the bill because of the importance of ethnic studies.
“Students were protesting at CSU [campuses] because they didn’t see professors that look like them. They experienced a lot of microaggressions,” Kaur said. “As a woman of color in STEM, I can verify that on the daily there are microaggressions like even in my genetics class.”
She said the California State Senate is reviewing the bill, which has recurred on every weekly agenda in 2020.
AB 1460 will commence in the 2021–22 academic year and would require CSU campuses to employ one three-unit course in ethnic studies as an undergraduate graduation requirement.
The Academic Senate of the California State University, which received input from various universities, recently adopted its own ethnic studies requirement, Academic Senate 3403.
The CSU Academic Senate recommendation also demands an ethnic studies requirement but it’s deliberately described as “outcomes” rather than “units.”
“[The Academic Senate is] trying to determine whether or not ethnic studies should be something to be even considered at the CSU level, like how we have our general education, we use those courses to develop informed citizens, not just your major kind of specific people,” said Kaur.
The structure of AS 3403 does not prevent a campus from adopting a “course-based”
three-unit framework but leaves that implementation for campus self-determination.
“The only reason the Academic Senate is looking at this is because of the fear that the state legislature is going to implement something. So if we can be certain that the academic senate will pass [AS-3403] I am for that,” Kaur said. “But if they are going to withdraw last minute from this resolution, which they have done in the past, then I would rather go with AB 1460 because I think ethnic studies is so important.”
