MHCC Fails to Communicate

I hate to say it, but I love this school a lot. It damn sure is not perfect but it and the great people that work at this school have helped change my life for the better.

But, sometimes things happen in ugly ways, and you must have some uncomfortable conversations for there to be some sort of resolution.

In Fall Term of 2024 students who participate in the Federal Work Study (FWS) program got an early Christmas – or so we thought. The per-term income limit for some students was raised to $2,400 which was awesome, but also suspicious.

The following term Mt. Hood lowered the maximum per-term income back to $1,500 with an email from Christopher Natelborg letting students who earn FWS dollars know of the change. Which is all good; hey, sometimes money runs low, and it is good to have a heads-up.

At the same time this Work Study debacle was happening we saw a large cut in tuition waivers, too. Keep in mind that this was not communicated to students whatsoever in an upfront manner. No email or anything. The way I found out in Winter Term was WORD OF MOUTH. I found out by chance that a resource I depend on at school was being cut.

I get emails for campus cleanup days, asking students to come clean up the school they pay to go to for some reason – keep in mind, many classrooms and parts of the school are not even cleaned by janitorial staff. In a lot of the classrooms in the school, only the trash is emptied, nothing more, leaving these rooms to be cleaned most of the time by low-income students who participate in Work Study.

I get lots of emails from the school but whenever there is something that goes against the school’s brand guidelines students will never get informed about it. We can get multiple emails about a student government election, but when the MHCC student body president resigns, we can never be told about. Even though every student body president I have seen in my three years here has resigned.

This Spring Term I was informed again by word of mouth that there will be no tuition waivers and no Work Study pay. I found this out about Week 4 of this term. It was too late to plan anything or drop my classes. This literally stressed me out and hurt me in a brutal way. And I know I am not alone. Some departments at the school had to scramble to find money to pay Work Study employees, or just let them go altogether.

Graphic by Ken Perez

This lack of communication and lack of being able to manage money is a huge failure of the school, and the school is so desperate to get a bond passed that its leaders won’t even respectfully acknowledge that they disrespected and hurt their own students and facility.

Lisa Skari, Christopher Natelborg, John Hamblin, Doctor Abio Ayeliya – and Mt. Hood’s deans and directors of departments and co-curricular programs – this is on your hands. Natelborg is the director of Financial Aid, and failed to inform students on this matter. Hamblin, the vice president of student development, and Abio Ayeliya, director of Student Life and civic engagement, failed to inform students on how their development, and their lives, would be negatively affected. Skari is the president of MHCC and failed her students.

You all failed to inform students that the school had mismanaged school funds, or at least to inform us of the direct impact on our lives, and because of this our community is in pain.