Dominique Luján has a picture of himself during his 2024 commencement ceremony, shaking hands with Jonathan Abboud, president of the Santa Barbara Community College District.
“I think I’m going to use it as part of my flyer because it shows that you can be an adult, graduate from school, and there should be no shame whatsoever,” Luján said.
Two years later, Luján, 44, has secured Abboud’s endorsement to replace retiring trustee Marsha Croninger in the race for the district’s Area 5.
Luján has also been endorsed by the Santa Barbara Democratic Party, the Santa Barbara Women’s Political Committee and the Democratic Women of Santa Barbara County.
Like his opponent, E. Howard Green, Luján grounds his campaign in his experience as an SBCC re-entry student. Unlike Green, he is a full-time student, working toward transfer to UCSB.
“To my knowledge, there’s never been a full-time student on the board of trustees,” he told the News-Press during an interview at his lower Riviera home.
“I am in school with kids who are 18 to people in their 80s. I am working with professors, some younger than me, some my age, some a few years older than me.
“And the beautiful nature of that is that I get to actually see how humans are functioning on campus. I don’t think the board of trustees always sees that.”
Careers That Pay — Right Away
A major part of Luján’s platform reflects his own success as a re-entry student. After being laid off from his career at Lionsgate studio in Santa Monica, he enrolled at SBCC and earned a certificate in Addictive Disorders Counseling. He began working in the field before he even completed his associate’s degree and earned his certification.
“That is one of my major things I want the school to be focused on, that we have those kinds of programs readily available,” he said. “So if what happened to me happens to you, you are able to retrain, pivot, or get yourself into a career or a job placement that’s going to get you paid right away.”
Enhancing its vocational-occupational offerings will also offset the district’s dwindling enrollment, he said. This is important because a large part of the college’s funding is based on the number of students it serves.
He particularly praised SBCC’s new “Ocean Initiative.” For this program, the college will partner with the Commercial Fisherman of Santa Barbara “to create career pathways, workforce training and shared infrastructure for the next generation of commercial fisherman and maritime workers.”
“We can keep our local population here, paying them good wages that do nothing except help the local economy,” he said. “We can go down the list of how having more workforce training jobs can be better for the school.”
Luján said he also wants the college to be more aggressive in using its open spaces to build student and employee housing. He cited the Wake Campus in Goleta as a prime location, even while acknowledging that the college — unlike UCSB — does not receive funding for student housing.
Both the city and county of Santa Barbara are moving ahead with building housing on its open properties, he noted.
“Even the [K-12] schools can find housing for their employees, so it’s not impossible,” he said. “I don’t want to be sitting on that board and saying ‘We can’t do this.’ I want us to say that we need to explore.”
Luján said he will also advocate for the college to have “a seat at the table” as the city establishes its Rent Stabilization Board and refines the newly adopted ordinance.
As a student himself, he gets “to see students who are actually couch surfing because they don’t have a place to live on the South Coast,” he said. “[The college] needs to have a voice in how the city handles this.”
Gay and bullied
Luján speaks openly about how he was bullied while growing up gay in his hometown of Santa Fe.
“That’s part of my story, and it’s what drives me to do this,” he said. “That’s a big part of why I want to be on the board, to make sure students feel safe.
As a result of his own trauma, he dropped out of college after earning too many Ds and Fs.
“I mean, I actually got a D in yoga,” he said, with a laugh.
“I know it’s nothing to laugh about, but this was back in the day when I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. “I was a young gay student in the early 2000s, and a lot of my focus was actually protecting myself because it was hard being gay back then. And so I wasn’t able to really focus on my academia.”
Luján said he was lucky to get a job with Lionsgate, first as an event planner and then as a well-paid location scout. He is still supporting himself with savings from that career, he said.
After leaving Lionsgate, he returned to Santa Fe, spent a year in Alaska, and settled in Santa Barbara in Spring 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 epidemic. He started taking classes that next fall and said he immediately connected deeply with the college and its employees
After earning his certificate, he decided to continue on and work on the bachelor’s degree that eluded him 20-plus years ago. He is now in the Transfer Agreement Guarantee program with UCSB, where he plans to major in political science, psychology or sociology.
Heartbroken and dismayed
Luján credits his difficulty growing up gay with developing an empathy that he believes is a powerful qualification for the trustee position.
That’s one reason he said he is “heartbroken” over the public tension between the current board and the faculty over pay raises. He was dismayed that the board gave the superintendent-president three raises over four years totaling 12.5 percent while offering nothing to employees.
“They [trustees] don’t get to interact. They don’t understand what the climate really is for the professors, what their morale is,” Luján said. “I get to actually see that. I get to see their faces when they walk in the classroom and they haven’t had a pay raise.”
Luján said he has met with outgoing trustee Croninger to delve into the college budget and hopes to keep doing so. He’s also looking forward to the extensive orientation the college offers new trustees.
While he doesn’t know yet what the solution is, he said he is determined to make sure employees are paid fairly for the life-changing work they do..
“So yeah, it might be awkward being on the board as a full-time student,” he said. “But I’m prepared to do both. I’m going to wear both hats, as awkward as it may be.
“And I don’t care about that because I love my professors and I love my fellow students, and I want to see the board work in a better way than what it’s working right now.”
