Rio Hondo College Library Ordered Open During Coronavirus: Emails

One of four emails sent to the Rio Hondo College website to Board Members on Monday, April 6, 2020 1:36 PM

"Recently, Dr. Arturo Reyes, President of Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California, made the decision to open the library on Monday, April 5, 2020 and keep it open throughout the semester to students for, as the Library website states, “checkout [of] Chromebooks and to provide wireless Internet access, study spaces, wireless printing, and copying.” Last week, from Monday March 30 through Friday April 3 a small team of the classified staff (and the Library Dean) passed out Chromebooks to students and were present to assist students in their use of the library as a study space.

The President’s concern, although ostensibly for all Rio Hondo College students, in this case focuses on the greater vulnerabilities of those students identified by the college as at risk due to their need for increased equity. As educators, education staff, and/or concerned residents of California and the nation, we empathize with the plight of such students in their struggles to succeed in their higher education endeavors. THIS IS WHY we call on President Reyes and the Board of Trustees of Rio Hondo College to rescind the decision to keep the library open.

Precisely these students are those who should not be led to believe they will be entering a safe environment when they enter the Rio Hondo College Library under these extraordinarily unusual and dire circumstances. The reasons for the risk are:

• Library Classified Staff are NOT supported throughout the day by Housekeeping Staff and must themselves disinfect the many and varied surfaces in which students come in contact. Housekeeping (presumably) arrive after hours to disinfect; however, unclear is which surfaces they have been cleaning and will clean in the future since the students are not confined to a small space and will need to spread out throughout the library in order to comply with the safe “social distancing” policy currently implemented at the state and county levels of California.

• Library Classified Staff have been sanitizing any surfaces they notice students using. The college supplied Staff with latex gloves and disinfectant. However, the Staff have been using masks they brought out of Library Archives for use when they engage directly with students since the college did NOT supply Staff with this necessary Personal Protection Equipment (PPE).

• Socially and economically vulnerable students are whole persons; they are singularly disadvantaged in the sense that they lack funds for purchase of technology, whether electronic devices or Internet access, but they are also family members, and their families also lack access to many resources. A primary example is healthcare, and the example of inequity following is for the undocumented student population and their families. As Kaiser Health News noted in its Disparities Policy (2019), “Among the total nonelderly population, 45% of undocumented immigrants were uninsured compared to about one in four (23%) lawfully present immigrants and less than one in ten citizens (8%) as of 2017” (Artiga and Diaz). Entering the library, which does not comply with the recommendations to “shelter in place” asserted by epidemiologists and other health care experts, puts these medically vulnerable families at risk.

• Of course, once anyone in a family contracts the virus, they cannot contribute to the financial support of the family, a devastating consequence for low income families of which the vulnerable students of Rio Hondo clearly are members. Also, as the New York Times pointed out in March (Fisher and Bubola), in addition to the two factors contributing to a higher mortality rate (older age and preexisting health conditions), “a body of research points to a third: low socioeconomic status.” Thus, for any group of economically and resource disadvantaged peoples, exposure to potential vectors of the virus need to be eliminated. This truly becomes a matter of life and death.

• Additionally, “each low-income family [is] forced to accept a higher risk of exposure” as a consequence of inequality. THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH OFFERING THE LIBRARY AS A RESOURCE DURING THE PANDEMIC. Rather than more creatively addressing the needs of these students so that they can comply with the shelter at home policy and remain safe with their families as more privileged students do, the President has decided to place these students, because of their status, in a situation that jeopardizes them and their families by opening the Library as a study space.

In addition to our concerns for vulnerable students and their families, we are addressing our concerns for the Rio Hondo College Library Staff. Many of these valuable college employees know well and empathize with the targeted students since they also were those very students in their youth. Rio Hondo Library Staff are the children of immigrant farm workers and other blue collar workers in varying fields. Several are immigrants themselves. Some did pursue a college degree in their youth and had these plans disintegrate because of the difficulties associated with poverty, frankly. They understand well the desire to improve one’s life and to attend an institution of higher education. And, on a daily basis they support Rio Hondo College students in their individual efforts to reach these goals.

However, they also are proud and dedicated employees of Rio Hondo College, and it grieves them to suspect that the college is not returning the spirit of dedication in requiring them to continue to work in the Library with students despite the danger that the Covid-19 pandemic has engendered.

Recently, President Reyes quoted revered American, Cesar Chavez in a message to the college community. We want to remind President Reyes that Chavez, as well as his compadre, another revered American, Dolores Huerta, were labor organizers who spent their lives fighting for the rights of workers, especially the right to a safe workplace environment. Since the Rio Hondo College Library staff is mostly comprised of women, in honor of Huerta, we offer her words about workers, the atmosphere in which they work, and their courage in risking their work status in asserting their rights for protection as workers:

“When they know they can have some type of security, some kind of protection, then they’ll come forth. But, it takes a lot. It takes a lot.”

Unfortunately, due to President Reyes’s decision to open the Library without consultation with the very people who will be required to work under these extraordinarily unusual and, in fact, dangerous conditions, the Library Staff does not feel “security [or] protection,” but with their own and the students’ well-being on the line, they are coming forth, nonetheless.

As a concerned community member, I call upon President Arturo Reyes and the Rio Hondo College District Board of Trustees to rescind the decision to open the Rio Hondo Library to students and to require the physical presence of Rio Hondo Library Staff in the Library until California Governor Gavin Newsom calls an end to the “shelter in place” mandate."