Peralta’s Student Trustees; Ready to Change the Status Quo Peralta News Centre January 2007 By Eve Pearlman Marlene Hurd, one of two students elected last June to the Peralta Community Colleges board of trustees, is in the Merritt College Admissions and Records Building on a recent sunny afternoon. Every minute or two her conversation is interrupted by other students asking for help: “Where do I get a course catalog?” asks one. “Where do I buy books?” queries another. Hurd, a 54-year-old Laney College political science major, is patient and kind with each questioner. She wants to help them find their way. “Look,” she says, gesturing to a long line of students. “That’s our future. When I look at them I want to give them hope.” Hurd herself first began taking courses at Laney after graduating from high school in Vallejo in 1971. But school didn’t stick then for the San Francisco native. “I didn’t see education as a valuable thing then—so I dropped out,” she said. Decades later, a
"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave." - Frederick Douglass