School safety update: One year later
Dec. 15 school board meeting (Christian Bon, The Puma Prensa)
By Christian Bon, editor, and Heyman Luong, Opinion editor
It has been just over one year since the fatal stabbing of Jayden Pienta at Montgomery High School, since a gun and bullets were on Maria Carrillo’s campus, since students across the district marched in protest with the backing of the community to push for change, and since Santa Rosa City Schools promised their students, staff, and parents that they would make a change. So what’s happened in the intervening months?
An immediate standout is that the return of SROs (School Resource Officers)—something that, while always a contentious issue, was pushed for strongly by students and staff—seems to have been almost completely ruled out. With the district accruing a projected $14.3 million debt, facing staff layoffs and, according to Superintendent Anna Trunnell, the pilot program of SROs costing “between $1.6 and $2 million…the district does not have the budget.” Even for just the two week period they were on campus they cost the district a little over $37,000 as the city didn’t provide a discount. Simply put by Trunnell, SROs “are not sustainable.” This is a troubling outcome for some members of the community, many of whom strongly pushed for their return in the March board meetings this and last year.
In light of the seeming infeasibility of SROs, the most likely avenue to improvement seems to be in the also-agreed-upon alternative solution for school safety. This solution emphasizes rehabilitation, prevention, and mental health care for students so that escalation to violence and police intervention never has to happen. Director Stephanie Manieri suggested looking into the Appa program, a mentorship and mental health program designed to be a resource for teens “to increase access to mental health services that are culturally responsive and involve our students and the whole family.” Immediately following the proposed solution, a long presentation was given at the board meeting on Dec. 13 on the past failings of alternative school sites suggesting ways SRCS could prevent the same mistakes, but since then, only brief updates and reports have been given, with little in the way of concrete plans. According to Carrillo English teacher Jordan Henry, “The district has been talking about changes, but they’re private until they make a public statement,” so possible additional progress has been made, but kept in committee meetings until further completion. This has led to a general feeling of a lack of action on the part of the District. Henry sums it up by saying, “Safety’s importance to the district was a bigger issue last year, but due to time and a lack of funds, it has slipped a bit.”
There has still been some identifiable change, however. With Henry pointing to “the Restorative Center [as] a good example of small-scale improvements for the restoration plan.” Carrillo’s Restorative Center was just recently remodeled and gained an additional Restorative Specialist on top of the one they had already had, Loran McBade, a six year experienced Restorative Specialist, who said that “having a second restorative specialist has been super helpful.” She is thankful for having “administrators really believe in restorative practices and use it as a great tool.” Almost every day for her is filled with conflict mediation and management from students sent by teachers or self-referred. There is a proactive piece done in classrooms as well as a sit down conversation with all parties after an incident has occurred aiming to return things to normal and encourage lessons to be learned. McBade sees success in restorative practices, noting an increase in students seeking out the restorative center on their own. Overall, she is “impressed and proud of students brave enough to come through and do conflict management,” “honored when students come in and trust [her] and the process,” and actively, “encourages all teachers to invite [Restorative Specialists] into classrooms.”
In addition to Restorative Centers, individual high school sites have also developed a safety plan. Carrillo has taken the approach of forming a safety committee which has now undertaken the responsibility of updating and managing the safety plan.
Assistant Principal Lindsey Apkarian, a member of Carrillo’s safety committee, believes that the “culture [at Carrillo] is very safe for students.” There have been “quite a few fights prevented” with real fights only happening maybe once quarterly. Apkarian also states that Carrillo is fortunate to have a generous parent group handling expenses that aren’t covered by the district or state money. The committee also has open communication with parents and is up front about updates to school safety to ensure families know work is being done. Notably, high schools have also received new emergency backpacks and keys and radios from the district. There is still, however, an issue when it comes to funding plans for safety at a site level, making some of the work the safety committee puts in a little meaningless. Henry pointed to a few consequences of underfunding such as “meeting outside of school hours [being] unpaid time. Spending Saturday or Sunday going through safety supplies to make sure everything’s in date and stocked [being] unpaid time. All the things we need to do in a disaster we aren’t trained on,” like walkie talkie use or putting together gurneys, “and we don’t train people because we aren’t paid. Henry puts it plainly: “Can we pay people to do these ideas? No.”
And many still question whether or not what the safety committee can do with the few resources given by the district is enough. The parents, teachers, and students that called for SROs have already waited a year only to hear that the district lacks funding for the program and still have not seen alternative sites or after school programs implemented.
Leaving school safety up to local high school sites seems to have resulted in focus shifting away from wider issues of school safety in the event of violent crimes or disasters and toward smaller scale behavioral issues and drug use, issues demanding plentiful and constant attention to address. Just recently, a small group of students super glued several locks around campus, causing thousands of dollars in damage. There are also issues with vaping, it being well known among Carrillo students that the bathrooms are usually smokey. Apkarian, while noting that she has only been on campus a short while, has noticed “increasing drug use,” and McBade who, despite acknowledging “behaviors are different year by year,” has also noticed “more vaping than we ever have had.” In Carrillo math teacher Carol Christiansen’s words, “Freshman are having a harder time adapting to high school.” And in member of the safety committee Jordan Henry’s words, “We don’t have the resources to fix it.”
Ultimately, progress has been less than many hoped. The district has made some small improvements like providing backpacks, keys, and funding for additional counselors as well as continuing to provide safety updates at every Board meeting, confirming that the issue is at least still being considered, but the potential impossibility of SROs is a blow to the goals of parents, teachers, and students in the March meetings of last year. The possibility of rehabilitation for students with behavioral issues before things could turn violent and a focus on the alternative solution to school safety gives a bit of hope to students and teachers that there may be a realistically attainable improvement for school safety on the horizon. But with behavior and drug use trending in the way they are, the community grows ever more impatient for a concrete solution to school safety and implementation of the rehabilitation and alternative site plans.