Concerns over safety, lack of campus officers at Santa Rosa City Schools after Montgomery High stabbing

“Why has it taken a loss of life for you guys to start caring about our school?”

The question came from a Montgomery High student who was addressing Santa Rosa Police Chief John Cregan during a Wednesday* news conference after a 16-year-old student was fatally stabbed on campus.

Students in the crowd applauded the question and shouted more.

“I think it’s important to remember that the Santa Rosa Police Department did not remove the community resource officers from your campus,” Cregan responded. “That was a decision by the Santa Rosa City School board.”

At that point, Cregan and other school and city officials who were in attendance ducked into a nearby classroom as student shouted more questions at them, leaving police spokesman Sgt. Chris Mahurin behind to face the students.

At issue is a June 2020 decision by Santa Rosa City Schools trustees to suspend the district’s relationship with the Santa Rosa Police Department while it evaluated its school-resource officer program, which had been placing officers on high school and middle school campuses for 25 years.

In the wake of the George Floyd murder by police in Minneapolis earlier that summer, districts across the country began reevaluating the efficacy and fairness of school resource officers. Critics say uniformed and armed police officers on campus can trigger anxiety among students, especially students of color, who are historically disciplined at greater rates than their white peers.

Mahurin said Santa Rosa police haven’t had resource officers since, but in the wake of Wednesday’s stabbing, social media posts and online comments from parents called for their return.

Cregan told The Press Democrat that in the 2022 calendar year, there were 945 calls to the 25 schools in the district. In the last 12 months there were 97 calls at Montgomery High School, but comparisons with other high schools were not immediately available.

Cregan said he believes the Montgomery number is high, but he didn’t have specifics on what the calls entailed.

He said investigators believe the three students involved in the fatal stabbing had been involved in several altercations in recent weeks, but none of those incidents led to 911 calls.

Cregan said the benefit of having school resource officers is that they tend to hear about rumors and fights, and they build relationships with students that help keep schools safer.

In a recent interview about the city’s inRESPONSE civilian mental health support team, Cregan said he has received feedback from school officials and community members that they would like to see the team more integrated into Santa Rosa schools.

He said he envisions bringing back a revamped school resource officer program coupled with a mental health clinician, and that it is one of his top goals for this year.

The program could be paid for through a quarter-cent public safety tax that voters approved a 20 year extension on in November.

Katheryn Howell, president of the Santa Rosa Teacher’s Association, said there’s been a frustration among teachers and the district officials over the dismissal of school resource officers.

“The teachers ever since have been protesting … the fact that the SROs aren’t there,” Howell said. "What’s happened of course is that the students don’t feel safe at all and there are no SROs.“

She said that in general there simply are not enough adults on campuses. She added that teacher vacancies across the district have led to burned out teachers who are expected to make up for the work that school resource officers did.

“The SROs were dismissed and nothing was done to replace the work that they did,“ she said.

Santa Rosa School Board Vice President Omar Medina — who previously opposed the district’s school resource officer program — said that it wasn’t clear yet that a police officer on campus would have made a difference Wednesday.

“Whether an SRO was on campus or not. I don't know if anything would have been different in terms of a weapon having been brought by that student,” he said.

In 2020, Medina was a leading voice in favor of removing school resource officers from campuses, arguing that students of color, in particular, were harmed by the presence of officers on campus in conjunction with other disciplinary policies.

The board voted 7-0 in June 2020 to suspend the partnership with the police department while creating a 32-member committee made up of teachers, students, parents, administrators, police officers and community members to examine the program.

The school board opted not to renew the program in November 2020, effectively casting aside the committee’s recommendation to reinstate it with changes.

On Wednesday, Medina said that over the last two months, as concerns over violence in schools have risen, the school board has “internally been having discussions about continuing the conversation around safety on our campuses.”

Placing school resource officers, or SROs, back on campuses should be part of that discussion, he said.

“I'm always open to conversation and to dialogue around the issue, that's important. It's important for all sides to be heard. And I really think we need to listen to everyone; I know the students need to be heard. We need to hear about their safety concerns. I'm sure that there's many students that don't feel safe, that are traumatized by what has happened today, not just at Montgomery, but at all our schools.”

He said he was not in favor of placing metal detectors on campuses, because they have the effect of “making that school feel like a prison.”

And he said he still has concerns about the impact that police officers on campus have on students of color.

“We can't ignore that. I mean, to me, part of the issue is if you, especially if you live in poor communities that are, you know, are highly policed … and if you see police like in your community, if you see police always around you and then you go to school and there's police there, it's that idea that, you know, you are a criminal, right? And so that begins to step into your mind. Well, this is what the community sees me as, is what I'm going to be.”

Santa Rosa City Schools Superintendent Anna Trunnell was unable to say Wednesday whether the district or school will have any new safety measures in place when Montgomery reopens.

"We are going to be assessing how we approach supporting our students and making sure that they know that this is a safe place. And we will be examining how exactly we're going to do that."

Libby Dalton, a parent and co-president of the Montgomery Education Foundation, said it’s a “mixed bag” of emotions that parents feel toward putting law enforcement on campus.

She said after Wednesday’s student death, the community is left with overwhelming feelings of fear, anger and sadness.

“The school did everything they could today, but the amount of fights on campus and the way the incidents are handled needs to change,” Dalton said. “Maybe a school resource officer will help that, maybe not, but we have to try something.”

*Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correct the day authorities held a news conference on Montgomery High School’s campus following the stabbing of a 16-year-old student.

Press Democrat reporters Colin Atagi, Paulina Pineda and Madison Smalstig contributed to this article.

You can reach Staff Writer Alana Minkler at 707-526-8531 or alana.minkler@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @alana_minkler.