Decision not to name Santa Rosa charter school for youth mentor rankles

A new charter school planned on the campus of Lawrence Cook Middle School will be named The Hope Academy. That makes a number of people very unhappy.

A broad coalition including former politicians, teachers, school board members and parents had pushed for the school to be named for Eugene Mijares. The Santa Rosa City Schools employee and truant officer, who died in 2009 at age 62, was recognized as a mentor to and advocate for countless students, particularly those at-risk of drifting or being pushed to the margins.

But Mijares had a restraining order filed against him in 2002 for domestic violence. Court records have been destroyed and nothing further is known about the details of the case. Santa Rosa City Schools board members acknowledged that before deciding against naming the school, which is to open in fall 2016, for Mijares.

“I don’t have the facts one way or another,” said director Bill Carle.

Friends of Mijares say the court action arose from a dispute he had with a tenant who he wanted to leave his property.

“What he told me at the time was, he realized that she was very unstable and didn’t want her on the premises and she kept coming back asking for help,” said Caroline Bañuelos, president of the Sonoma County Latino Democratic Club. “It wasn’t this domestic violence for years. It was someone who kept trying to come back into his life.”

The order was vacated in 2004, a year-and-a-half before it was due to expire.

Mijares himself later filed for an emergency restraining order against the person who requested the original one against him. Because he didn’t follow up with the court, it was never granted, said a report from the school district’s lawyer.

It is unclear whether Mijares was ever even charged with a crime, and he was never convicted of one.

Despite the outpouring of support in Mijares’ favor, the information about the restraining order - unearthed by a district investigation prompted by his sons’ mention that their father “had difficult times in his youth” - derailed the effort to honor him.

At the latest school board meeting, on Wednesday, Salvador Baldenegro said he owed his success today to Mijares’ support of him when he was a “troubled kid.” “Who planted that seed? It was Eugene; it was him,” Baldenegro said.

Ana Salgado said she’d been having trouble with her family and children when Mijares noticed and reached out to her.

“When I was about to give up, he held my hand and told me just keep going, keep strong.”

Former Santa Rosa City Councilwoman and school counselor Marsha Vas Dupre said, “If this school is not named for him there is going to be such a rebellion, and that’s not an idle threat.”

Even the board members who decided Wednesday not to name the school for Mijares acknowledged the inspiration and support he provided students. Two years ago they had committed to naming some portion of the school being developed on the Cook campus for him.

“There are reasons why I thought it would be great to name the school after Eugene Mijares,” said director Jenni Klose. “Because he’s a local hero, because he did so much for the youth, because he was so focused on keeping kids in school, because he dedicated his life to education, because I got emails and calls from people who said, ‘He changed my life,’ ‘He saved my life.’?”

But the restraining order weighed too heavily against the case supporters made.

“We can make all kinds of assumptions but we have no idea. But where I get hung up is this … one in five women is abused in their lifetime by an intimate partner,” Klose said.

“If someone says, ‘Someone stole my car,’ everyone believes them. But when a women says, ‘I was beaten or I was raped,’ about half the people say, ‘Really?’ And that’s a real problem. And so to not take this seriously, or to not believe it, is perpetuating that problem,” she said.

Carle said: “It’s obvious he had an impact on a lot of people and a very, very positive impact, and that’s all any of us can hope as we walk through life.”

But the fact that a judge, after a hearing, determined that the temporary restraining order should be made permanent swayed him, Carle said.

“This case was not dismissed. This case went to a hearing and that’s all I’ve got in the way of information,” Carle said in an answer that spoke to the murkiness of the issue. “When it goes to a hearing and a judge makes a decision, there’s something to it. And when nobody can define it to me, tell me what it was or wasn’t, I don’t know what choice I’ve got as a member of the community.”

Two board members voted for naming the school after Mijares, Ron Kristof and Laura Gonzalez, who said she ran for the board partly due to Mijares’ encouragement. She was incensed at the opposition. “In my tenure of about eight years on this board I don’t think I have ever been so angry,” she said.

Referring to a family service center on the Cook campus, Gonzalez said: “The whole point of hope, and Via Esperanza is to give hope to students and especially, lets face it, on the west side of town, the poorest side of town, the brownest side of town, to give a little bit of hope.”

Mijares “is that hope because he had rough beginnings,” Gonzalez said. “So he wasn’t as pure as the driven snow, sorry, most of us aren’t.”

In a later interview, she said that she would have reconsidered her support if there had been proof or if she had believed that Mijares had genuinely committed domestic violence.

In a passionate statement, she also suggested that the district was punishing Mijares for the times he had pressed them to do more, or to do differently, on behalf of Latino students and other students of color.

“I am a conspiracy theorist,” she said. “I’ve said this before. Eugene Mijares was a pain in the butt to this district; he was a thorn in the side of this district. And lo and behold, they have managed to run his name through the mud.” The statement drew loud applause.

Superintendent Socorro Shiels delivered her response in a raised voice: “There was no conspiracy to stop this. We were finding a way that the board could make an informed decision that reflects their values for the community.”

Bañuelos said the Latino Democratic Club is to meet next week to see if there is any way it can respond to the decision.