This is the expanded version of an article published in partnership with Berkeleyside, a nonprofit digital news platform in Berkeley. Read Trustee Nicky González Yuen’s Q&A here, and read a shortened version of both interviews here.

As the Peralta Community College District prepares for a funding plateau, Area 6 Trustee Dyana Delfín Polk is gearing up for another four years on the district’s governing board.

Polk, a political organizer and campaign consultant, represents the Berkeley and Oakland hills and parts of North Oakland. She describes herself as a third-generation community college graduate and the daughter of a union electrician.

As trustee, Polk is one of seven officials tasked with overseeing the district’s finances, monitoring its performance, and hiring its chancellor. The district’s newest chancellor, Tammeil Gilkerson, stepped into her role in January, and is the fifth chancellor since 2019.

Because she’s running uncontested, Berkeley voters won’t find Polk’s name on their ballots. To highlight this often overlooked seat, Peralta’s student-run publication, The Citizen, sat down with Polk in their newsroom at Laney College.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The Citizen: Why are you running for a second term?

Polk: I am so honored and privileged to be the Area 6 trustee. So Area 6 covers North Berkeley and North Oakland. I’m running again because there’s a lot of work to do in our district. I really feel strongly that we’re entering just a brand new chapter with the arrival, or the re-arrival, of Dr. Gilkerson to our district, which happened under my leadership as the chair of the board and also on the chancellor search committee.

My background is, I’m a third generation Chicana. I’m a third generation community college graduate. Community college is what got me to this point in my life. When I decided to run the first time, I decided to run because I had gotten so much out of my community college experience. I went to Merced College, as I’m sure you guys know, and it was the first place where I felt like I truly belonged. I started as a 16 year old dual enrollment student, and by my senior year of high school, I was a full time college student there.

When I decided to transfer, I look back on that experience and know that that’s exactly what started my life in public service. Not only was I an ASMC Senator, I was also a student ambassador. I was president of my honor society, the alpha, gamma, sigma Honor Society. I was in the Honors Program. I was a congressional intern, and I worked part time at the bookstore. I also was ascribed for what was then called the disabled student services. I believe they’ve rebranded that. And so I was very busy. I was very involved, and I did that because I really loved it.

I approached my first term, and now my second term, with the same tenacity, with the same desire for public service. I’m here for you, the students. I’m here to represent all of you, not just in my area, but also everybody in our district. I consider myself to be representative of everybody, including our faculty, our staff and our community members. I decided to seek a second term because I’m not finished yet, and I think that our district is not finished yet, and I have more to do.

Name three things you want to see happen at the district during your term.

Number one thing, I would say, is we need student housing. That is something that I have kind of put a little bit farther back in my list of priorities, because my number one priority during my first term was to ensure that we have a permanent Chancellor. Now that we have her here, and she’s doing a fabulous job, I really want to start looking into student housing. I was very vocal about that, and we were evaluating that at the board level, in terms of our pilot program at [the College of Alameda].

My second priority would be to ensure that our finances are in shape. We have a lot of work to do with that, with our hold harmless leaving and [the Student-Centered Funding Formula] coming, and the changes in how we get funding. I want to look at additional revenue sources so we’re not so dependent on government funding, because that can fluctuate to a point where it makes it difficult to budget.

And then the third thing is to really get our facilities back the way they need to be. That’s something that has fallen by the wayside for a really long time, and I am super, super confident that under Dr. Gilkerson’s tutelage with the board that we have now, I’m confident that we can get there.

Peralta is bracing for a budget plateau, brought on by enrollment declines and shifts in the funding model for California Community Colleges. A new analysis by Fitch Ratings expressed concerns about Peralta’s outlook, warning the district about the ripple effect that cuts could have on enrollment. How do you as a trustee seek to balance the continued costs of the Peralta district, the reality of its limited budget, and the needs of students?

I’ve been very vocal and very public about me wanting to explore additional revenue sources. So our school is not a “basic aid” district, right? We rely on other funding, bond measures, state funding, enrollment, et cetera. We rely on that a lot. And I want to make us more self-sufficient financially, because I can see down the road what other community colleges are doing and trying to protect themselves against the plateau that we are seeing ourselves with.

I really want to work together with my colleagues and our chancellor and her team to be able to identify additional revenue sources. I have some ideas about that, but I want to also make that into a community process, because I feel that there’s been a lot of talk about that in the community here in Oakland in particular, about what we’re going to do, not just with community colleges, but also with K-12 and higher-ed in general. I want that to be a community process about different ways that we can bring more revenue into the district.

One way is, last year, we hired a grant writer. So that person’s sole job is to bring grants into the district to help fund some of these things like deferred maintenance and other stuff. And so I want to continue that trend. I want to be able to bring more money into our district so we don’t have to cut, because we know that cuts impact enrollment, I know that. I don’t want to have to cut. I want to be able to bring money in so we can give you all, as the students and our staff and our faculty, the services in the classroom training that you will need and want.

Since 2006, Alameda County voters have passed two bond measures totaling $1.19 billion to repair and upgrade Peralta’s facilities. Considering Peralta’s persistent facilities issues, how can voters and taxpayers depend on you this term to get these projects done?

What I’m really excited about is the brand new Berkeley City College West in downtown Berkeley. Every time I go by there, it’s taller and higher and being built really quickly. I specifically call that one out because one, it’s in my district, and then two, it’s the community’s bond dollars at work. We know that that’s going to go towards additional classrooms, additional labs. We are using that money responsibly in that way.

We’ve had a lot of turnover in our administration. We’ve had some turnover on the board as well. I think this new era that I was talking about earlier on, this era of stability, is what I’m really hoping. And I see it. I see it happening. I think just morale. I think the way people feel at our campuses has changed since Dr. Gilkerson arrived, and I think her steady hand will be what a lot of the voters will be responding to. She’s very visible. She’s been on the road a lot. She goes to a lot of the community events.

Trustees, we also do the same thing. We are the ambassadors for our district. To ensure that we’re spending those dollars responsibly, to your point, we need to ensure that the board has oversight over that funding we had. We’ve had reports before. We’re getting more reports at the board level, since there is a bit of a separation between the Bond [Measures] Oversight Committee and the board. But I’m keeping an eye on what’s going on, because we have to hold ourselves accountable to the voters for being so generous to us, and that’s the least we can do, is to responsibly manage those funds.

Did you want to add anything about the repairs?

Absolutely. So I touched upon it a bit earlier, but I mean, there’s a lot of repairs to be made. I’ve been hearing a lot about it. Someone just emailed me a couple days ago about ADA violations that are happening at [The College of Alameda] – I want to make sure that we are responding to those before they happen. We should not be having any sort of violations of that sort on our campuses. We need to really go back to basics when it comes to facilities and ensure that those dollars are being spent responsibly.

Peralta’s new interim Executive Director of Public Safety Abdul Pridgen recently voiced a desire to create a hybrid security model that utilizes “sworn officers”. Where do you stand on this?

I’ve thought a lot about this. Part of my background is in violence prevention. I’ve done this work for about seven years of my career. That’s the job that I had when I was first selected. I’ve also spent the last year working for the city of Oakland, and so I’ve gotten quite an education about how to address public safety, and it’s not an easy question to answer.

That being said, I think again, we’ve had turnover in that department. We’ve had turnover with that particular position, and I have not yet seen the progress that I would like to make on our holistic safety plan. I am hopeful that moving forward, we will have that.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. I don’t like the idea of sworn officers on our campuses, just personally as my own values. I think that there are a lot of ways to minimize crime without having to have that on campus, but I am open to having a discussion and hearing what other people think as well, because it’s not just up to us, it’s up to everybody.

In June 2023, you voted in favor of asking the state for $52 million to build a dorm at the College of Alameda, which was projected to cost the district an additional $42 million. Some faculty leaders criticized this initiative, pointing to the district’s current struggle to maintain its facilities. Where do you stand on this issue?

Like I said before, student housing is a priority of mine. What I was hoping to happen was not necessarily to have the district pay for that $42 million but to find grants, and hopefully the state would have been able to put more money into that particular project.

I would never want to put the district in a position where they would have to shell out $42 million for anything, unless we were going to see a return on that. And so as high a priority as student housing is, to me, I think that we were also working with a lot of unknowns back then. I stand by that vote, because I do think that student housing is an issue. It’s a huge issue. I faced housing insecurity when I was a transfer student. I’ve been there.

So for us as a district, yes, we have to absolutely take care of business at home and get back to basics, but I think that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can explore other revenue sources that would be able to have us build student housing in the future, when the time is right. And again, under Dr. Gilkerson’s leadership, I’m more than confident that we can, at some point, get there.

In August 2023 the district’s faculty union sent postcards to residents of your trustee area. These postcards asked your constituents to contact you about the former Interim Chancellor Jannett Jackson’s $400,000 salary, and district-paid $3,500 per month apartment in Jack lindensware. How did you respond?

Every person that wrote to me, I responded back to them. I understand the faculty union’s frustrations with that at the time. Again, I think that this was a different period in our history, and so I understand people’s frustrations. I do continue to pride myself on how open I am and how accessible I am to my constituents. I have people write to me fairly regularly, and I hold meetings, I’ve held meetings, I continue to be open to them.

And so that’s how I handled it, was to go back to them and say, “Look, this is what we’re doing. This is how I’m – at the time I think I was Vice Chair – This is what we’re doing to address these concerns.” So that’s what I did, I kept myself open, I addressed it. I had a lot of people reach out to me, and I was happy with the leveling of engagement from my constituents, because I don’t always hear from people. I hold office hours, I usually only have one or two people come, and I’d like to get those increased. I’m working with our current student trustees to hold office hours again. But that’s how I addressed it. I was very open and explained as much as I could from my end.

Did you want to clarify how you explained it to your constituents?

Sure. I have a copy of it, I didn’t actually read it before this meeting. But yeah, I think there were specific things in that that were a little bit not all the way accurate. I explained my side of it in terms of the salary, in terms of Jannett Jackson’s experience. I was on the board when she was hired, but I was very new. I will just say, four months into my terms, is when the former chancellor quit. There are a lot of things that I know now that I wish I had known then, for sure, and that comes with experience. And I think in a lot of ways I would have done things differently. But I addressed it by talking to my constituents and explaining some of that to them, I was very, very honest about it.

What book are you reading right now?

I’ve been trying to make more time to read, but I have a stack of books like this high that I am waiting till after the election to read. However, one book that I’ve been reading is called the Young Woman and The Sea, and it’s about the first woman who swam the English Channel, and I was on the swim team when I was in high school. Disney just did a really fabulous movie. It’s really great, very inspiring at the time that I needed to be inspired.

Anything else you want to add?

I really appreciate being here. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. I feel like I don’t have a lot of avenues by which to address the public, other than on the dais.

I’ve learned a lot in the last four years. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, things that I would do differently. I was touching upon that before. I think that comes with experience. I had a really challenging first couple of terms. I spent the first two years of my term on a computer, and so there’s still people that I’m meeting. Building relationships is something that’s going to be really important to me in the next four years. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to address all of you.

As an uncontested candidate, there are a few endorsements that I didn’t get to go through because everyone’s like, “Okay, well, you’re done.” But I’m really proud of the coalition of labor unions that have supported me. I have SEIU 1021, I’m very close to them. I used to be a member when I was with the City of Berkeley. I’m also endorsed by the Construction Trades Council of Alameda County. That’s an important endorsement for me, they hold a lot of relationships and a lot of just values that I value myself. My dad was a union electrician. My mom is a public school educator right here in Oakland. I am inspired every day by my family to continue my work in public service, and so I really appreciate being able to talk to y’all.

I want to just say again that I am very accessible. I give out my cell phone number, I think it’s on the website. So please text me. Please call me if you have any concerns, anything that I should know, please let me know, and I will answer you. Thank you very much for this opportunity.