“The budget deficit is public enemy No. 1, an enemy that will steal our hopes and kill our dreams of becoming a great city if we ignore it,” Reed said, using a quote from a speech he gave five years ago, as he began his discussion of his budget plan for 2012.

Reed said his budget plan approved by the San Jose City Council in May has two main goals this year.

“Ensure the solvency of the retirement plans by reducing the city’ s annual cost for retirement benefits to last year’ s level,” Reed said. “Open the city’s vacant libraries, community centers, fire stations and police substation.”

Reed went on to discuss the police budget, saying “Despite increasing the budget by nearly a $100 million dollars over the past 10 years, we now have fewer officers than we had a decade ago.”

“Those figures just don’t match up,” Aaqilah Brown, 19, biology major, said. “What are they doing with the money?”

The rising cost of retirement, “was the single largest cause of those cuts,” Reed said.

Reed also said he wants to see voters approve a ballot measure in June.

The measure would require current city employees “to pay a larger share of the costs of their retirement benefits,” Reed said.

Reed said that the costs of retirement benefits have risen from $73 million in 2001-2002, to $245 million in 2012.

“Retirement benefits now cost the city more than 50 percent of base payroll and consume over 20 percent of our general fund budget,” Reed said.

“I would like to see him do more than just play with numbers,” San Jose City College communications professor Merylee Shelton said.

Shelton said the city plan needs “out-of-the-box thinking, not slash and burn.”

She would like to see the city establish a two-tier system where employees hired before the rule took effect would retain their benefits and new employees would be subject to the new regulations.

Reed said that in the past 10 years the city of San Jose has eliminated more than 2000 city jobs.

“Every city job eliminated reduces the services we can deliver to our residents,” Reed said.

“I think the mayor should start funding programs for the disabled and the elderly,” said Pat Riley, 46, environmental science major.

“Our numbers for the CSU are fairly steady, and they’ve kind of decreased a little bit because we no longer have a transfer admission agreement with San Jose State, San Francisco State and East Bay,” said Doriann Tran, director of the Transfer Center.

A transfer agreement is an officially approved agreement that matches coursework between a university and a community college.

When the school becomes increasingly impacted, it forces them to cut these types of programs.

With so many students preparing to transfer fall 2012, Carol Vasquez, student retention assistant, said students planning to transfer in the next couple of years should make sure they are meeting the requirements universities are asking for, especially since they change every year.

“Create a two-year plan or transfer plan with a counselor,” Vasquez said. “Follow that plan and, if you need a revision, you need to meet with your counselor.”

When applying to a university, students should prepare for the process ahead of time.

“Always have the next semesters planned out in your head,” said Katherine Jackman, 20, English literature major.

Patrick Loera, 33, English major, agrees that students should not procrastinate with their applications.

“Treat the application process like you would treat a research paper,” Loera said. “Students can’t wait until the last minute and do it all on the last day.”

Tran advises students to be involved in the events the Transfer Center offers.

“Some of the students that come in, we’ve never seen them until the day they apply,” Tran said.

The Transfer Center is located on the second floor of the Student Center and assists students in transitioning from a community college to a university.

Vasquez said the center also offers workshops for financial aid advice and applications to help make sure students are filling them out correctly.

“We’d like to see them (students) more often before they apply, so it gives them more time to participate in the events, like bus tours,” Tran said.  “And they can keep their options open for the schools they want to apply to.”

For students who are transferring, remembering why they are attending school and what they want to achieve during their time at San Jose City College is just as important as their final destination.

“When you think about the end goal, about where you want to go and what you want to be,” Loera said, “it’s inspiring.”

From the time they make the decision to become vegan, be it by a conscious decision or a bad experience with a meat related food product, vegans and vegetarians take into account everything that ends up on their plate.

Vegetarians do not eat meat, although they still eat animal related products, such as milk and eggs. Vegans, on the other hand, have an entirely plant derived diet, with no animal products at all.

“Being vegan is super hard,” said Sameer Rahman, 20, Good Karma patron. Rahman said he is not vegan himself, but he knows vegans in his hometown of Felton. He said vegans “have a lot less to choose from to eat.”

Ryan Summers, 35, the owner of Good Karma and a vegan of 15 years, said he gets all of the nutrients he needs from his vegan diet. “Between legumes and tofu I get tons of protein,” Summers said, “I do exceptionally well on a vegan diet.

Some people change their eating habits when they find out how their food is being made and out of what. Erin Salazar, 24, who is vegetarian, stopped eating meat after she took classes on environmental law and sustainable agriculture, and she said what she found out about the farming industry really upset her and made her rethink what she eats.

Salazar said the only downside to being a vegetarian is when she goes to someone else’s house and she has to say, “Sorry, I don’t eat pork, I don’t eat lamb and I don’t eat fish. That part is a little hard because you want to be polite, but at the same time, you can’t eat this.”

Being vegan is not for everyone though.

“Every body type is different,” Summers said. “You have to just listen to your body and do what it tells you to.”

The council meets in room SC 204 at 2 p.m. every Wednesday.

In this meeting there were 14 people representing different bodies of the school, including the student body offices and representatives from the Media Club, MeCha, SANCAS, cosmetology and esthetics.

President Mike Casas brought up the topic of accreditation. The school is on probation and has to prove to the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges that it can make and sustain ACCJC’s requested changes.

The vice president of AS, Maryam Rahim, displayed a spreadsheet detailing the budget, and the council began to discuss which items should be funded.

The upcoming March in March was heavily discussed. They talked about how they were going to pay for the buses, food and coffee for the event as well as the total cost, which is $2,500.

The council will be purchasing 260 shirts for the March in March at a cost of $1,000. The shirts will say “San Jose City College Student” so students can show their presence in Sacramento.

The council debated releasing funds for SJCC students to have greater access to the Martin Luther King Library. The contract would let students have access from midnight Sunday to Thursday. The item was postponed until a better deal could be reached.

The council approved spending $2,000 on sending six students and one adviser to the Latina Leadership Network Conference in Long Beach, California, from March 1-3. The attendees will have to sign a contract before going, and they must make a presentation to the school on what they learned and what were the benefits of attending.

The council decided to release funds to buy clipboards for $150. The clipboards will be used for signing up for clubs in March.

The next item the council approved was the purchase of a Spiniteir poster-printing machine. The money will come form AS savings from 2011 and the cost is $5,000.

The council approved buying a new microwave for the Tech Center Café for $200.

For Black History Month, the council will spend $350 on food and prizes for contest winners.

The council is going to spend $600 on its parliamentarian retreat on March 9.

Joe Andrade is being reimbursed $50 for extension cables. He paid for the cables that powered the Christmas lights.

For United Nations Day and Veterans Day, the council approved $30 for posters and advertisements.

Rahim talked about planning for club day. She said she would like the event to occur March 12 and would like to pair it with another event. The idea was postponed due to lack of attendance last semester and will be discussed at the next AS meeting.

By 5:20 p.m., there was no longer a majority of members required for the meeting to continue, and the meeting was adjourned.

Speed City is the nickname given to San Jose State University’s world-class sprinters coached by the late Bud Winter, and its legacy lives on through the San Jose City College men’s basketball team.

Two of those sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, attended SJSU in the 1960s and were young African-American college athletes stuck in the middle of a turning point in American history, the civil rights movement.

Smith and Carlos were able to overcome adversity and cultural boundaries for several semesters at SJSU before letting their speed do the talking to the world at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, and that talk was loud.

“I think as an African-American athlete in those days, it would be hard to deal with the problems from the other races on the track. They made history, and it makes me want to win even more because I am the only female running the 400 meter,” said Kristyl Blue, 18, administration of justice major.

After their wins, Smith and Carlos had the pleasure of a victory lap before standing on the podium to accept one of the greatest honors in an athlete’s career, Olympic medals.

Smith won the gold medal in the 200-meter dash breaking the twenty-second barrier for the first time in Olympic history, and Carlos won the bronze medal in the same event.

During the awards ceremony while the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played, the athletes lowered their heads and raised their fists in support of equality and the removal of all cultural boundaries.

Although disputed by the U.S. Olympic Committee, the International Olympic Committee expelled Smith and Carlos from the U.S. team.

Nevertheless, their records and legacy still remain; in fact, there is a 22-foot-high statue near the center of SJSU campus in honor of the former students’ protest.

“That is a very humbling situation, and I would be glad to have that opportunity, not only as an athlete, but as an African-American man, to make that change, said Moses Kinnah, 20, business management major and Point Guard for the SJCC men’s basketball team. “They ran but it was much bigger than that.”

Coach Percy Carr liked the sound of the nickname and applied it to the men’s basketball team.

“I thought about it and said, ‘Fast break? Speed City?’ That sounds like San Jose City College basketball,” Carr said.

Speed City continues to break records, only now it’s on the basketball court.

In fact, Carr said that SJCC men’s basketball team is on the brink of breaking a California Community College record with 800 wins. The team only needs three wins to tie the record and four wins to break it.

“I would like to be there next season to be part of the team that breaks the record, said Chris Turner, 20, social science major and Small Forward for the team. “I would prefer it to be at home. Breaking the record at home would be more special than winning it away.”

Carr said, “Speed City implies that we are going to fast break every opportunity we get, and we like running so it is about speed.”

Kavalier said that she had to look at enrollment trends to justify hiring a full-time faculty member for the Journalism Program, and she said the data didn’t support it.

“Often journalism has struggled to have enough enrollment to make a class,”
Kavalier said.

An October 2011 Journalism Program review found that journalism writing and broadcasting classes were filled from 70 percent to 100 percent while the newspaper enrollment was 60 percent capacity and no journalism courses had retention issues.

Academic Senate President Charles Heimler said that the president has to consider the four performance indicators listed in the school’s Strategic Plan, which include access, retention, persistence and success.

“They’re looking at demand for the classes, and they use waitlists as a measure of that, and they’re looking at historical patterns of enrollment in the courses,” Heimler said.

Journalism professors from many California community colleges that produce a newspaper say that at least one full-time faculty adviser is necessary for any newspaper to excel.

“A full-time faculty member allows the program and publications to flourish in terms of quality, retention, enrollment, prestige, recognition, continuity, performance, first amendment issues and many other advantages,” said professor Pat McKean of Long Beach Community College.

Santa Rosa Junior College journalism adviser Anne Belden agrees that a journalism program needs a full-time faculty member.

“Having a full-timer in charge of the program definitely enhances enrollment, retention and the program as a whole,” Belden said.

Another danger to the Journalism Program is that adjunct faculty are not protected from retribution from administrators.

“Despite the Student Adviser Protection Act of 2008, the truth is an adjunct has no protection from presidents taking revenge against them for what students publish. Full-timers do,” said journalism professor Robert R. Mercer of Cypress College.

He was fired from Evansville (Ind.) University for what administrators characterized as “not keeping those students in control.” He said students at Evansville proved the university had violated their civil rights.

Mercer also said that it might be a violation of the California wage and hour law as well as the adjunct union’s contract to not have a full-time adviser who can “teach students the full freedom of what the First Amendment gives students.”

Heimler did say that there is a plan in progress by the college president and himself, as well as instructors in English, journalism and communications, to devise a program that will meet enrollment criteria.

“The college president is very interested in developing a new media-type program that will fulfill that need moving forward in the next 10, 20, 30 years,” Heimler said.

However, journalism courses that produce the newspaper are in a precarious position each semester as they have been threatened with cancellation for low enrollment and arbitrarily omitted from the schedule of classes in past semesters.

In an email to the campus, ESL Instructor Ron Levesque wrote about the danger of losing enrichment programs on the campus.

“If we follow enrollment patterns alone, we would return to a program of the three R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic) and lose out on programs in the arts, in physical education, in journalism, leaving a campus with no core, no heart and no student voice in the case of journalism.”

Score: 9 out of 10

Warfare took to the skies like never before in World War II, and an amazing part of American history took place with the Tuskegee Airmen. In “Red Tails,” the new movie by George Lucas, a group of these pilots are shown to be the best American pilots and soldiers who set an important precedent for the Civil Rights of African-Americans.

The film features good acting and a well-written script. It has a nicely paced plot with a great mixture of action, romance and drama, and very few glaring historical inaccuracies. I left the theater impressed by how much the film would fit in among other great WWII-themed films.

My major complaint is that the movie failed to “wow” me. It is good in every area that a movie is expected to perform; however, it is not exemplary in most of them.

The casting was well done; and with a primarily African-American cast, it was nice to not see the glaring cliches, such as characters being over-acted or poor slapstick humor, I have become so jaded over.

Despite what many other reviews have claimed, some of the dialogue impressed me; and it stood out more than many of the other qualities of the film.

In one scene the pilots are in an officer’s bar speaking with caucasian pilots of bombers they had protected. When asked what the African-American pilots prefer to be called if not “colored,” Andrew “Smoky” Salem, played by Ne-Yo, said, “When you get angry, you turn red. When you get sick … you turn green. When you get scared, you turn yellow, and you have the nerve to call us colored?”

I recommend this movie to anyone who is a fan of WWII movies or the Tuskegee Airmen. It is definitely worth seeing if you don’t know who the Tuskegee Airmen are and how they contributed to the American war effort in WWII.

Cordell Kintner | TIMES STAFF

Graffiti tag on the fire alarm in the third floor men’s restroom of the Technology Center on Dec. 20.

“Jew for life” read the green words on the door of a stall in the third floor men’s bathroom of the Technology building.

Graffiti is a major problem on campus; the facilities department is struggling to keep up with how fast it appears.

“Everywhere you turn it seems that there’s a new tag mark somewhere,” said Joe Andrade, facilities manager, “Not only in the bathrooms, but on the signs throughout campus, or on the signs as you enter campus.”

Taggers do not realize the stress they put on the school.  Andrade says that San Jose City College goes through 36 cans of graffiti remover for $15-to-$20-per can, per semester.

This may not seem like a lot, but sometimes graffiti remover will damage walls, so the district painter Randy Durbin has to paint over it, which wastes more resources.

“Sometimes you have to prime as well,” Durbin said, “I’ll leave to let the primer dry and take care of some other stuff, and when I come back, there’s graffiti on the primer.”

The campus police are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of graffiti as well.

“The budget situation nationwide, and specifically in the city of San Jose, has reduced the number of personnel on the Graffiti Abatement Unit, said Ray Aguirre, chief of police for the San José/Evergreen District Police Department.

With the limited amount of staff, it is hard for the campus to handle the rampant vandalism occurring on campus; they need the help of the staff, faculty and students as well.

“Eradicating vandalism is a community effort,” Aguirre said, “The public needs to participate in the sense of reporting vandalism; when they witness it to report it immediately.”

Vandalism that causes damages less than $400 is a misdemeanor; anything more is a felony.

If you witness vandalism occurring on campus, as well as any other crime, call the campus police department at 270-6468.

This means that every word you read isn’t from the administration, staff or faculty but from a fellow Jaguar who comes to class looking to turn in work and get a grade. Our grades are given not just on the content and quality of our work, but on the response from you.

The old saying goes that, “When writing a paper, write it for the professor, not for yourself,” but that doesn’t really apply to us. I have to start off by writing what I love, my news, my thoughts, my opinions; but after the paper is printed, I listen to you for my final grade.

If you disagree with what has been said in this paper, please let me know because we welcome criticism and other people’s thoughts. Every time I start making a new paper the class starts off by critiquing the last one just to make the next one better. If you want a hand in this, send me an email to citycollegetimes@jaguars.sjcc.edu. I would love to hear from you. Trust me, I read every single one!

If you want to interact with the students and would love to report on what happens to your fellow Jaguars, please think about joining our class and newspaper as staff. The paper can always use other opinions and the staff loves working with students. It is the perfect place to improve your writing, photographs and even video. This is the most hands-on course I have taken and is definitely my favorite.

Don’t worry if you think you’re a horrible writer or photographer. I myself started off this semester, my first ever in journalism, with some of the sloppiest articles I had ever read, and my first ever written. I think I almost flunked English in high school! But with the help of others in the class, I am now on the Editorial Board. Without their support, I wouldn’t be writing this letter to you.

If you are interested, please flip to our in-house ad on page eight and sign up for one of the classes. If you don’t know what exactly you would like to do, I will work with you in class.

But again, the Times is here for you. Without the support of the students, it would be nothing.

We have a whole new semester ahead of us, and with the ups and downs of last semester behind, I could not have hoped for a greater way to earn these credits.

Thanks to every reader,

Jonathan Marinaro, managing editor

“Professor Behroozi is very dedicated,” said Erick Arambula, a psychology major student. “The professor knows what he’s doing and what he’s talking about.”

At age 12 Behroozi said he was very comfortable playing music. His early playing included the harmonica, the dulcimer, violin and guitar. “Music was one of my great passions from a young age, and I was involved in music and pursued it,” Behroozi said. “At my late age, I’m a teacher at San Jose City College and this has taken me to where I am now.”

Behroozi is Persian, born in Tehran, Iran. He has lent his artistic talent around the world.

“Behroozi is a kind, hard working and dedicated faculty member,” said professor Priscilla Santos, guidance counselor and professor. “As a music professor, he helped me and supports students in need.” Santos thanked Behroozi for many years of wonderful friendship.

Behroozi has been featured as a soloist of classical guitar in many countries, such as France, Italy, Israel and around the United States at concert halls and churches.

“Professor Behroozi is a very knowledgeable person. He does a growth assessment on a weekly basis in order to get good feedback. I highly recommend him as a great instructor,” said Cristina Chambers, a child development student.

Behroozi graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor of science degree in math in 1968 and a master’s degree in music in 1971. He has taught music appreciation as well as beginning and intermediate classical guitar at SJCC since 1975.

“He is a very patient person, easy to get along with and nice to talk to,” said Jose Torres, a computer networking student.
Behroozi has admired various periods and genres of music ranging from the Renaissance period to the 21st century. “Fernando Sor and Johann Bach are two of my favorite artists.”Behroozi said.

“My greatest moments in music are the success of the students,” Behroozi said. “Some students excel and continue going forward to join a conservatory, concert solo or play in an ensemble. My goal is to retire soon and teach part-time classes.”