news story / By Ryan Burns

Fee-For-All

For six years, CR illegally heisted hundreds of Hamiltons from students

(Aug. 20, 2009)  Why did College of the Redwoods charge students for tests the state had already paid for?

Say you’re an incoming CR student who just took the mandatory math and English assessment exams and — dammit — barely missed the cutoff for those college-level courses you’d been aiming for. Bummer. But no biggie, you tell yourself (and maybe your parents); you’ll just study a bit more and take the tests again. Except, when you show up for the retests you learn that there’s a $10 fee for the second go-round — math and English both. Same with the third try, should that be required.

“Lame,” you mutter to yourself. “Like missing the grade wasn’t bad enough.”

It turns out that these student retest fees, which CR charged between fall 2003 and spring 2009, may have been more than just a bummer and a hardship for students; they may have been illegal. Assessment exams for incoming students are required under California law and funded through the state’s matriculation allocation. In other words, CR already gets paid to administer the tests, so charging students constitutes a double-dip — one that’s forbidden under Title Five, the state regulation code governing education.

Over the past six years, the seemingly nominal fees (what’s 10 bucks, right?) may have had untold adverse effects on students. Karen Rio, CR’s student representative to the Board of Trustees, recalled one fellow student — the Associated Students treasurer, in fact — who recently settled for a lower-level math course after realizing the retest fee would leave her without enough cash for the bus ride home. “That’s against the law,” Rio told the Journal last week.

Assessment Supervisor Ruby Sodhi, who administers the student exams, said the impacts may have been worse still, considering the majority of CR students rely on financial aid. “They’re being asked what’s more important — the money in their pocket or the classes they want to take,” Sodhi said. For strapped students possibly wavering on their commitment to higher education, that choice could provide just the discouragement they don’t need. “I think to some degree that impacts their ability to complete and move forward with the goals they had,” Sodhi said. “I can’t say for sure how it impacted them, but it’s definitely not setting them up for success.” Exemptions were available, though few students requested them, she said. (For entirely separate reasons, Sodhi is currently pursuing a discrimination lawsuit against the college.)

No one reached by the Journal could explain the original justification for the fees. Learning and Student Development Vice President Keith Snow-Flamer said their continuance through last semester was a simple oversight. Administrators, he said, failed to notice when state regulations changed in 2004, forbidding such fees.

Yet someone did notice the change in Del Norte; that campus never charged for retesting. And Sodhi said the matter didn’t go unnoticed in Eureka, either — that in 2004 she sent her supervisor a copy of the relevant passage in the California Community Colleges student fee handbook, which states, “There is no authority to charge a fee to students for assessment tests that are a part of the matriculation process.” Her whistle-blowing was disregarded, she said. Sodhi also claims to have alerted Snow-Flamer immediately after he was hired in 2006. “He just nodded and moved on to something else,” she said.

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