Río Hondo College Board of Trustees Vice President Yarisma Rocha is featured in the Fall 2026 issue of Trustee Quarterly, the national magazine of the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT). The profile, written by ACCT Kids on Campus Director Miya T. Simpson, Ph.D., traces Rocha's path from a single parenting student at Río Hondo College to a leader on the board that governs it.
Rocha enrolled at Río Hondo College shortly after graduating from high school as a young Latina single mother, unsure that college was possible for her. Encouraged by her older brother to take a full course load, she earned three As and a B in her first semester. During her third semester, her daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. Rocha spent the next three years supporting her daughter through treatment while continuing her studies, never dropping out.
In the article, Rocha credits the College's integrated network of support with making that possible. Trained, compassionate staff connected her to financial aid, EOPS, CalWORKs, work-study and on-campus jobs, and student organizations. The Río Hondo College Child Development Center cared for her then two-year-old daughter, giving Rocha the stability to stay enrolled full time and complete her goal of transferring to the University of Southern California.
"Rio Hondo College was my home," Rocha says in the profile. Her daughter, now a healthy and thriving teenager, remembers the Center's teachers and cap-and-gown celebration and considers herself an alumna of the Center too.
Today, Rocha is an alumna of Río Hondo College and USC, an IT project manager for a prominent bank, and a planning commissioner for the City of Pico Rivera. As a trustee, she has made parenting students a policy priority. She supported the board's approval of a partnership between Río Hondo College and Baldwin Park Unified School District to expand child care through Head Start, which brought ACCT's Kids on Campus model to a California community college. She also advocates for adding infant and toddler care so parents do not have to wait, as she did, until a child turns two.
"I had no title, but I had a purpose," Rocha says in the article, describing the early days of her public service. The piece closes with her advice to parenting students to ask questions, speak up, use every available resource, and not give up, along with recommendations for trustees and campus leaders on treating child care as student success infrastructure.
Read the full profile, "From Single Parenting Student to Board Leadership," in the Fall 2026 issue of Trustee Quarterly (PDF).