Systemwide Committees: Student Representative Reports

Committee members present:

• Doug Robinson, Vice President Student Services, CSULB
• Dave Sanfilippo, Director of Student Services, CSULB
• Mary Cheng, Director of Students with Disabilities at CSU East Bay; project director for the Center for Alternative Media. (Will be working for the Chancellor's office in January looking at disability access)
• Eunmi Cho from Sacramento State
• Greg Cho, CSU state-wide senate, professor at Maritime Kennedy Vallejo
• Ray Moreno, Chancellor's office
• Michael Ease third year student at Cal State Long Beach
• Mary Shojai, Director of Disabled Student Services at San Diego State University
• Laurie Flynn, Director of Students with Disabilities at Cal State San Bernardino; chair of the DSS directors group and with CAM
• Paul Miller, Cal State Fullerton DSS
• Dr. Macnimari, Cal State San Marcos
• Ralph McFarland (excused)

CAM is the CSU center for alternative media in an effort to build a community among the 23 campuses of the CSU. The Purpose of CAM is to pool and leverage the CSU resources to tackle the problems on CSU campuses to deliver affective alternative formats of textbooks to eligible students in a timely manner.

Last year 21 campuses participating in the CAM project: Maritime Academy and another school (not mentioned) are the schools that are not part of the project.

CAM was done under the auspices of Assembly Bill 422 that requires publishers to furnish electronic texts for the CSU. Assembly bill 422 outlined book publisher's responsibility to provide an electronic text for those students who qualify. Currently CAM has over 5500 modules as of September 6 2005. The average life span of these books is approximately 16 years. 4000 of these titles that were acquired over the last year.

Some other benefits of CAM: it allowed a three day turn around of texts rather than the weeks that many of the campus are used to receiving. The projected return, last year, was exceeded and the "savings" was of about $69,000.

Funding of the CAM: Last year CAM was financed by the Chancellor's office and the rest was covered for by the campus'. However there is going to be a bigger need for staff to pay. The staff position who has been running CAM was working only full time the balance last year was for about $60,000 and the CO seems to be very dedicated about providing this level of funding. Additionally, next year, we are hoping that it will be for $80,000. The need is not going to be going away anytime soon; but rather only end up getting worse.

Another issue is people having to worry about paying for copied versions of text because it costs a lot of money. There is already a process in place for K-12, but they have a much smaller library of material than higher education degrees.

Book share is what the CAM would like to be. A digital Library of Congress to trade materials for people with disabilities and they can join for a nominal fee and download any trade book that's in their depository in Silicon Valley. The CSU applied for a federal grant in order to be part of a federal grant repository for textbooks in the CSU but we were declined the grant; however, there is a lot of the technology already available. Coming up with a "universal design" in order to get the books for all students nationally established.

Office of Civil Rights - One student complaint will cause a great deal of problems for the campus'. It was made clear that everyone would like to know more. One thing that was suggested by a few members was to make disability awareness training mandatory for certain employees just like it is for sexual harassment training.

The current liaison with the Chancellor's Office regarding these issues (OCR complaints) is Allison Jones.

Interpreter - Interpreters have a huge cost range in difference. In San Francisco, the interpreters are being paid $90 - 125 per hour. Deaf and Hard hearing students are costing the universities a large amount of money and is becoming a larger problem because of summer school, etc. which is costing much more because team interpretation is necessary.

Physical Access Issues - System-wide Training - Best Practices There is a $150 million worth of identified area projects in books and in the system.

It was suggest that the campus planning committee should have the Director of DSS sign off on it. The group would like to invite Tom Kennedy from the CSU Chancellor's Office come to the next meeting in order to get recommendation back to the Chancellor regarding this.

Next meeting will be held April 21, 2006.