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June 8, 2026

Board of Trustees

Peralta Community College District 

Board of Trustees 

333 East 8th Street Oakland, CA 94606

Dear Board of Trustees,

cc: Local Elected Officials

My name is Dr. César A. Cruz. I am the Co-Founder and now former Executive Director of Homies Empowerment in Deep East Oakland, a D.Min. candidate at Pacific School of Religion, a 32-year K–12 educator, and a son of Compton, Jalisco, and Oakland. I write to you not only as a community organizer, but as someone whose life's work has been built in and for the same communities that Laney College and Merritt College have served for generations. I am writing to urge you, with all the urgency this moment demands, to stop the proposed merger of Laney College and Merritt College.

This is not a bureaucratic question. This is a question of whether or not we believe that our communities, Black, Brown, immigrant, working-class, formerly incarcerated, chronically underserved, deserve their own places. Plural. Distinct. Rooted. And the answer must be yes.

Laney College sits in the heart of vibrant, multicultural downtown Oakland, across the street from the Oakland Museum of California, blocks from historic Chinatown, and a stroll from Lake Merritt and the Oakland Estuary. That location is not incidental. It is everything. For families in Chinatown, for recently arrived immigrants navigating new lives, for young people stepping off BART and into a future they weren't sure existed for them, Laney's downtown presence is a literal lifeline. It is accessible in the most physical and spiritual sense of the word. To reduce its institutional identity is to tell those students that their geography doesn't count.

Merritt College, nestled in the hills above San Francisco Bay, offers students the opportunity to study in one of the most dramatic natural settings in Northern California, a 125-acre campus with panoramic views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean. But Merritt is not just beautiful. It is vital. For students from Deep East Oakland, from the hills and the flats and the in-between, Merritt is a destination, a sanctuary, a place that says: you can climb, and I can breathe here. The very journey to campus, up into those hills, is itself an education. And the programs waiting at the top are irreplaceable.

I know you know this but, Merritt College was home to the first Ethnic Studies program in the country, offering the first Black history course in 1964 and becoming the first department in 1967, one year before San Francisco State's, and it was the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. In 1961, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale met at Merritt College. Their organizing gave birth to survival programs that fed 20,000 children each day, provided legal aid, distributed clothing, and ran health clinics for all underrepresented communities. That legacy lives in the soil of that campus. You cannot consolidate it into a logo change or a new name.

Laney College has been a leader in academic and vocational education for decades, with renowned programs in Journalism, Culinary Arts, Mathematics, Machine Technology, and Ethnic Studies. Today, Laney is the largest of the four Peralta colleges, serving over 16,000 students per year. Laney carries a legacy of trade, craft, and vocational empowerment that working-class Oakland has depended on for over seventy years. These are not duplicate institutions. They are complementary pillars.

I have reviewed the letter submitted by Dan Lawson, Vice President and President-Elect of the Merritt College Academic Senate, and the numbers speak clearly. Based on the district's own figures, the proposed merger would increase the annual Fund 1 deficit by approximately $2 million per year. The projected administrator savings of $1,260,777 do not come close to offsetting the $3,329,169 annual loss in apportionment revenue. And the two-year apportionment buffer being offered is not a solution, it is a financial sleight of hand that borrows from 2030, 2031, 2032, and every year after, in perpetuity, to pay for a decision made in 2026.

Beyond Fund 1, both colleges together receive more than $20 million annually in categorical funding for the programs our students need most, Street Scholars, Basic Needs, the Wellness Center, Veterans Services, Puente, Sankofa/Umoja, Disability Services, and EOPS. Under a merger, both the base allocations and headcount funding for these programs would be cut. The district's own leadership has acknowledged these risks and negotiations with the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office are still ongoing. To vote on this merger before those negotiations conclude is not fiscal responsibility. It is fiscal recklessness. It surrenders the district's leverage before the deal is done.

The Merritt College Academic Senate, under Board Policy 2510, passed a resolution formally opposing this merger until and unless district leadership provides a comprehensive, independently verifiable fiscal analysis demonstrating a clear financial benefit. That analysis has not been provided. The Deputy Chancellor refused even to answer questions from faculty and academic senators. That is not shared governance. That is top-down imposition dressed in the language of necessity.

I understand that there is a real budget crisis. I have spent over three decades in East Oakland watching resources get pulled from communities that need them most, always framed as inevitable, always falling hardest on the most vulnerable. But the solution to underfunding is not self-destruction. The solution is collective imagination, political will, and creative funding strategy.

We should be fighting together for increased state apportionment, not cannibalizing what we have. We should be convening community stakeholders, philanthropic partners, and local government to explore supplemental funding, parcel tax measures, and creative revenue models. We should be demanding that Sacramento treat these colleges as the irreplaceable public infrastructure they are, especially in this political moment, when public education, immigrant communities, and Black and Brown students are under coordinated attack at the federal level.

This is exactly the wrong time to close ranks. This is the time to widen them.

The president of Merritt College once said to his community: "Even though we're up on the hill, the college belongs to you too. This campus belongs to you." That is the spirit we must protect. Both campuses belong to our communities. Not just the buildings. The identities. The histories. The futures.

I respectfully and urgently call on you to reject the proposed merger of Laney College and Merritt College, to require full financial transparency including the outcome of categorical funding negotiations before any irreversible action is taken, and to convene a community-led process to explore funding solutions that do not require us to choose between our institutions.

We do not have to choose. We must not choose. We must find another way, together.

Asé. Amén. Ameen. Así sea. Mexica Tiahui. En Lak'ech. Ubuntu. Om.

With deep respect and fierce love for Oakland,