Low-income children in Santa Cruz County received a gift from the feds this holiday season: a $2 million grant awarded to the Child and Family Development Programs (CFDP) through the American Recovery and Investment Act. The grant will be used to expand the CFDP’s Head Start and Early Head Start programs, which currently serve 451 low-income children in Santa Cruz and Watsonville. The grant will allow for 130 new service slots, starting February 2010. The CFDP is a component of Santa Cruz Community Counseling Center, and is a national, government-funded effort to provide early childhood education and family support services.

UCSC -After approving an ominous 32 percent student fee increase at their Nov. 18 meeting (see goodtimesantacruz.com’s Slug Report for more info), the UC Regents have announced that they are kicking off a massive system-wide private fundraising drive to give back to the students. Project You Can, as it is called, aims to raise $1 billion in donations—more than the 10 UC schools have raised over the last five years for undergraduate, graduate and professional student support. The regents hope the drive will help them make amends with the thousands of UC students and faculty that have been protesting their financial practices as of late.

Frustrated students leave classrooms and take to the streets

“I think it's great that enough people want to make a change, that they're all out here, skipping classes, not eating, not doing anything,” said UC Santa Cruz freshman Tess Geyer. “They're just out here protesting [and] standing up for the rights of our class itself and then future classes.”

The Nov. 18 protest was organized weeks earlier in conjunction with the regents' expected approval of a 32 percent fee increase that same afternoon.

The word is out and generating hoopla at the national level: UC Santa Cruz is looking for a full-time archivist for their Grateful Dead archive. So far the position, offering $52,000 to $68,000 a year for a Deadhead with a master's degree in archive management, has produced media interest (and some jeers) from the Daily Show to the Wall Street Journal. The archive itself, while full of tripped out tidbits and stoney memorabilia, is in actuality no laughing matter, and was awarded $615,175 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to continue their work. The archive covers the now legendary band's history from 1965 to 1995 and is comprised of thousands of pictures, documents, and other memorabilia, two-thirds of which were donated by the surviving members of the band in 2008. No one has yet been selected for the position (which will entail continuing the archive's move onto the web, among other things), but whoever does get the job, with mockery at the national level and outright objection from taxpayers (although the job is not supported by taxpayer money) and students with ever-rising tuitions at the local level, is going to have their work cut out for them.

UC SANTA CRUZ - On Friday, Nov. 13 hundreds of UC Santa Cruz students marched into the Science and Engineering Library and refused to leave, creating a sit-in protest of the UC-wide budget failures and the resulting affects (like the library being closed on weekends). Hundreds more students participated in a statewide protest of the UC Regents meeting on Nov. 18. Read more about the controversial 32 percent student fee increase and student protests in this week’s Slug Report blog at goodtimessantacruz.com.

Santa Cruz County’s transportation agency has until next June to spend millions of dollars in grant monies awarded to the county for rail trail acquisition, and is hoping to close a deal with Union Pacific by the end of this year, thereby purchasing the 32-mile stretch of railroad from Davenport to Watsonville.  Among the questions being raised: Is it financially responsible? Even if we can afford it now, what are the long-term costs?

They came for their portraits with expectations of the perfection of their postures and I saw the beauty in their worked bodies, alive and in the midst of something.

Don Williams, founder of Rainbow Theater at UC Santa Cruz, is proud of his students and of his unique creation, now in its 16th year.

“We do an in-depth study on a multitude of cultures that the main canon will not touch upon,” says Williams of his flourishing theater program that produces plays by both amateur and professional playwrights.  “Quite often we deal with student writers of color, giving them an opportunity to express their lives and their ways of living that we are able to bring in and have a greater appreciation for.”

The multicultural theater organization's fall season opened Thursday, Nov. 5, and is continuing this weekend with two separate productions each with two plays.  On Friday, Nov. 13 actors will perform “Stop Kiss,” a love story about two young women who struggle to have their relationship accepted, and “Saint Lucy's Eyes,” which is about abortions in the African American community during the Civil Rights Movement.  On Saturday performers will showcase their talent in “In the Time of Rosalia,” a tale of a family reunion in Honduras and “Poet's Corner,” a collaborative project of dancers, singers and slam poets.

The County Board of Supervisors committed to backing the plan to create a bike path through the 68-acre area of Arana Gulch on the east side of Santa Cruz. The Arana Gulch Master Plan calls for trails through the greenbelt as well as one pedestrian-bicycle bridge, creating a link between Broadway and Brommer streets. The 12 members of the Coastal Commission will ultimately be the deciders of Arana Gulch's fate, but the backing of the County Board of Supervisors is a positive step for those on the side of cyclists and hikers.