Student leaders and education officials are preparing for a large turnout at Thursday’s Arizona Board of Regents meeting at UA, where regents will vote on tuition-surcharge proposals for each university.

Members of the Arizona Students’ Association are encouraging students, friends and family members outside of Tucson to organize carpools to UA and call students in Tucson to make sure they attend, ASA apprentice Christina Rocks said.

“We really want to pack the meeting room … with people that these extreme surcharges would affect,” she said.

ASA board chair Michael Slugocki said he wants the regents to vote on tuition surcharges in front of as many students as possible.

“We’re trying to make sure that the regents see the consequences,” he said. “We’ve really built up a lot of students who have been a part of this process.”

The last regents meeting held at UA set record attendance, with more than 800 students, alumni, business leaders and community members showing up to protest the Legislature’s budget cuts.

ABOR spokeswoman Andrea Smiley said student leaders made an extensive and concerted effort to get people to January’s meeting, which resulted in the large attendance.

“We haven’t gotten any indication of that occurring [this month],” Smiley said.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a low turnout.

“Any time you’re discussing tuition, you need to prepare for a large number of folks,” Smiley said.

The room in UA’s student union where the meeting will take place has moveable walls and can be expanded to twice its normal size if needed, as it was in January, she said.

UA spokesman Jeff Harrison said he could not predict what
attendance for this month’s meeting might be because of conflicting signs.

“The tuition vote is likely to be the draw,” he said in an e-mail, “but since the hearings the other day were so lightly attended and because there is no opportunity for public comment during the upcoming meeting, there is no real indication to expect a larger than normal crowd.”

Rocks, who also noted that there will be no time allotted in the meeting for the public to comment on the surcharges, said students should call or e-mail regents before the meeting to express their feelings about the surcharges.

“While this approach may seem limited, it is really one of the most important ways to make sure that regents hear the student voice,” she said.

ASA board member Sarah Atwill said the students’ association is focusing mostly on bringing out UA students and community members, who made up most of the audience in January and typically had the most students at this semester’s protests at the state Capitol building.

UA student leaders are using a lot of outreach tactics to raise awareness of the meeting on campus, she said, including
e-mail and social-networking announcements to get students interested.

“They usually get a lot of students out there,” she said. “We’re really just offering up a support system.”

Reach the reporter at adam.sneed@asu.edu.