No high school to close after Friday’s SRCS Board meeting: what comes next?
Outside the board meeting (Alexa Rios/The Puma Prensa)
Written By: Natalia Woods, A&E Editor
After months of turmoil and public outcry, the Santa Rosa City Schools Board has officially decided to keep Elsie Allen High School open and close three middle schools over the next two years, voted in the Board meeting on Friday, February 21.
The Board meeting on Wednesday night left the community unclear on the future of Santa Rosa City Schools– specifically the fate of all middle schools and high schools. The Board called for a special meeting to be held on Friday and made it clear that a decision was to be made that day.
Each Board member gave a quick word before getting into the main discussion. Trustee Jeremy De La Torre prefaced the meeting by apologizing that it was even necessary, and “[apologizing] that a new plan [was] now coming forward at the 11 ½ hour.” He followed this apology with a word about the board and its public image following Wednesday’s meeting. “A disheartening perception of the community is that we are a split board,” De la Torre said. “The moment we took the oath of our seats… whether you took that oath two days ago, two months ago, or six years ago, we became the Santa Rosa City Schools board, and when we inherited that, we inherited all the decisions that came along with it before us, good, bad, and indifferent.”
After a presentation from the School Closure Advisory Committee, Trustee Nick Caston quickly made a motion to keep Elsie Allen High School open as a specialized school and move forward with the proposed middle school closures; but the roll-call vote didn’t start until the final minutes of the meeting due to an abundance of questions from each trustee about the plan. There was an extreme mix of emotions felt across the Board leading up to the decision, coming from the projections presented by SCAC. The proposed plan had an expected savings of significantly less than the previously proposed scenarios; it would save a total of $2 million less than the original plan. Trustee Sarah Jenkins called the updated savings “terrifying” and briefly left her seat. Trustee Matt Kirby repeatedly said he is “truly not happy with these numbers.” Ultimately, the motion made by Caston passed with a 5-1 vote. Trustee Jenkins was the only no.
Outside the board meeting (Alexa Rios/The Puma Prensa)
So what does this decision mean for the future of Santa Rosa City Schools?
In less than six months, Santa Rosa Middle School and Herbert Slater Middle School will close, and Santa Rosa High School and Montgomery High School will become 7-12 modeled schools. Though the new MHS building isn’t planned to be done until October, the SCAC assured the Board during the meeting that the school has enough capacity to incorporate a middle school into its campus. This will add the additional 690 students at Slater to the campus of Montgomery, which already holds around 1,433 students currently. Year two, which is the 2026-2027 school year, includes Hilliard Comstock Middle School closing, and Piner High School becoming a 7-12 model as well. Elsie Allen High School will be officially restructured to provide a “targeted instructional program” that is focused on public health and safety.
Carrillo student Shravan Sundaram shared his sentiment towards the Board’s decisions throughout this entire process, feeling like they didn’t think everything through as much as they should have. “It could’ve been a more informed decision” Sundaram said. “They didn’t think well enough of the social ramifications of the 7-12 model.”
In terms of financial stability, the SCAC shared that going forward with the 3-3-0 plan would most likely put the district in “qualified status.” A district can either have positive, qualified, or negative certification, each signifying the financial state of the district. Santa Rosa City Schools being in qualified status essentially means that the district will not have a balanced budget for the current or two subsequent fiscal years. Being in qualified status puts the district at risk for negative status, in which payroll and other core financial obligations cannot be met, and could also result in the Board losing authority with the state taking control. Despite this evident risk, SCAC expressed that they felt the best way forward is with a qualified status in the short term to get us to a long-term better fiscal status. The Sonoma County Office of Education (SCOE), who was also present, also made clear the risk of moving forward with qualified status.
Because of the school closure savings being $2 million less than expected, the Board has to find a way to make up that number in staff cuts. District officials will be announcing the amount of people they will let go at today’s Board meeting; these people at risk may include staff like teachers, counselors, campus supervisors, janitors, and many others. March 15 is the last day to issue riff notes– preliminary lay-off warnings for teachers– while May 15 is the deadline for official termination.
The students at Carrillo all have many questions regarding the financial status of the district. Senior Soren Shioda raised a question about how we will deal with the existing budget crisis. “So what’s the future with that?” Shioda asks. “The bottom line is, we’re pushing our problems to the future.”