During its meeting on May 5, American River College’s Associated Student Body passed Bill 23-06. This bill allows members of the ASB to receive a $600 stipend.

Brett Sawyer, student life supervisor, said that this is a new development district-wide for ASB.

“You would be the first board to pass this in the Los Rios Community College District,” Sawyer told ASB members.

Maksim Yeremuk, senate whip, was not completely pleased with the amount.

“I would have liked to allocate more than $600,” Yeremuk said.

Senator William Robey reiterated his statement from a previous meeting that board members should be required to participate in implicit bias training.

“We actually have to do something,” Robey said. “If we’re going to start being paid, we’re going to need to be held accountable.”

Kate Williamson, librarian and ARC’s representative for the Textbook Affordability Committee, gave a presentation on the TAC’s review of the district’s definition of a “low-cost textbook” and its plans to possibly change that definition.

“Basically it’s $40 or less, but there’s a lot of stipulations that come with that,” Williamson said. “We don’t want to change anything else about the definition, but we’re specifically looking at that $40 or less.”

Williamson said that in order to support the change, TAC surveyed students to see what those in the district consider “low-cost.”

“If we changed it to $30 or less that would encompass 70% of our responses, as far as meeting student expectations for low-cost,” Williamson said.

Williamson says the TAC is looking for the support and interest of the board, and to take that information to the local and district academic senate for the vote on whether to change the definition.

On April 28, the election results for ASB were published. Sawyer said everyone who ran was unopposed and won their prospective positions.

“We had a total of—just to be fair and transparent—370 students from ARC participated in the elections,” Sawyer said.

Robey, who was reelected, said he already has ideas for the future that he would like to see come to fruition. These ideas include a mural in the library and raising the pride flag during pride month.

“There’s no legal restriction on it,” Robey said. “I think we’d be the first school to do it in Los Rios.”