Fight videos from Santa Rosa schools underscore concerns about campus violence

On Sept. 28, a Slater student was arrested for bringing a switchblade to campus.

On Oct. 6, Piner High School students were ordered to shelter in place after a 15-year-old boy was accused of threatening classmates with a knife.

Unchecked student behavior

According to Santa Rosa Police Department records, the number of 911 calls in the first two months of this school year has more than tripled at Slater compared to the same time span last school year. Since Oct. 4, they had 26 calls for service resulting in seven police reports.

At Montgomery High School, the calls for service have increased 50%. There have been 44 calls and 13 reports within the first two months of school, compared to 28 calls for service and 10 reports last year.

A separate dataset provided by the Santa Rosa Police Chief John Cregan showed that among all high schools, the number of calls and police-related events in 2023 so far has surpassed the past five years, including 2018, which had 722 events.

As of Nov. 2, there were 740 reported calls and events at district high schools, 160 of those were at Montgomery High, the most in the district.

Police and district officials acknowledge that a factor in the surge could be an increase in the reporting of incidents.

But the numbers, coupled with Telegram videos, show that the calls to end student violence after a 16-year-old Montgomery High School student Jayden Pienta, was fatally stabbed by another student on March 1 on campus have had little effect.

Post-pandemic student behavior has been described as uncontrollable at times — leading to frequent fights — as students adjust back to socialization of the classroom.

The district aimed to combat student behavior by implementing a "soft start" to the school year, where social and emotional learning is discussed and teachers alert their students to the mental health resources available to them. Despite this, teachers say behavior is only worsening.

The behavior has strayed from being concerning to uncontrollable and unsafe, six teachers at Slater Middle, Montgomery High and Santa Rosa High told The Press Democrat. They described how students egg one another on, and are blatantly hostile toward teachers and students without any apparent consequences.

Logan Kaper, who’s in his seventh year teaching science at Slater, said most of his classes have been running smoothly this year, but there are a couple of classes with daily disruptions, ranging in intensity.

Sometimes it’s something small such as refusing to sit down, followed by rude gestures flashed at teachers. Sometimes things escalate and a student might throw items, ending in Kaper being unable to continue teaching.

It can get worse than that.

“There are students that are exhibiting intimidation behaviors toward other teachers,” he said. “They will flash wads of cash in teachers’ faces, whistle in their faces, yell in their faces … students surrounding teachers trying to intimidate them, all while other students are looking on.”

In between classes, students initiate fights, with hoards of their peers surrounding them to watch or film on their smartphones.

According to Telegram video comments and interviews with students and staff, the “beef,” (slang for drama) that starts the fight, is usually over something that was said on social media. Footage shows both boys and girls fighting one another.

The fights appear unrelenting. Teens often don’t stop when teachers try to intervene. Some of the videos show adults being flung to the floor or getting caught with punches.

“Kids are a little bit different now,” said Montgomery special education teacher Paige Warmerdam. “They're more brazen.”

A veteran teacher at Slater asked to remain anonymous due to the fear of violent retaliation from students who have threatened her and her son, a student at a different district middle school.

The teacher said that the September lockdown at Slater seemed to be a wake-up call for staff and school officials, who are trying their best to handle the escalation in physical altercations.

“I don't think people understand the severity of that situation that is continually going on,” she said. “That there's still two sides fighting over that day — and I don't believe it's going to stop, unfortunately.”

Student mobs can become perilous at times, according to the teacher, with kids being trampled, pulled to the ground and crushed against walls as people rush to join the fight or record on their cellphones.

“You could scream, you could do whatever; they're not stopping,” she said. “They’ll plow teachers over. They’ll plow students over. That’s where it becomes a mob, and then you're stuck in the mob.”

Students regularly tell her they’re afraid after these incidents, she added. It came to a head three weeks ago, where she sat her class down, and informed them how to keep themselves safe during a mob.

“If you're stuck in that mob, you're stuck,” she explained to them. “Get to an open area and then just keep going, even if it's whatever direction, get yourself into an open area.

“Never in my life have I ever had to teach students how to get out of a mob that's happening weekly.”

Lack of meaningful discipline

All the teachers interviewed said they see a lack in meaningful discipline contributing to the rise in student behaviors and mob-like violence.

Kaper, the Slater science teacher, said teachers are able to suspend a student from their classroom if they’re being disruptive, but beyond that, there’s little they can do. They're seeing the same students who are causing issues, suspended and then returning to cause the same disruptions over again.

When other students see there’s no serious repercussions for acting violently, it creates a space where teachers no longer have control over their classrooms, leaving students and teachers unsafe, Warmerdam said.

“There needs to be a hard line,” she added.

Teachers said they feel like their on-site administration has their hands tied, and ultimately the serious discipline is up to the district.

“Our principal or vice principal or office staff; everybody is really working hard to confront these issues,” Kaper said. “I feel like a lot of the limitations are coming from the district level.

“If a student brings a knife to school, we have students getting a one- or two-day suspension,” Kaper said. “We need some more serious consequences for this. That starts sending a message to the other students.”

“There's no authority, and (the students) run the school and they do what they want,” said the anonymous Slater teacher. “There's nothing we (can) do about it.”

Parents like Melissa Stewart have sensed the unsafe conditions ramping up, and also are waiting for district intervention.

“I do see the board really talking about how school safety is a priority. But I think we're all frustrated. We don't want another committee,” Stewart said.

Her son is a sophomore at Montgomery, and often tells her about the harrowing environment on the high school’s campus.

“I don't think we have tools in place and a real understanding of what's going on,” she said. “I just think it's an emergency. We should have implemented a lot of things yesterday.”

Many of the criticisms were leveled at Santa Rosa City Schools Superintendent Anna Trunnell and her staff for failing to take a tougher disciplinary stance, particularly against known troublemakers and repeat offenders.

In an interview with The Press Democrat, Trunnell disputed the notion that the district has failed to act, and noted that the district’s new Safety Advisory Round Table met for the first time this school year on Sept. 18 to go over the progress they made last year.

The committee, known as SART, is made up of parents, teachers, students and district officials. The group was called together after Pienta’s death to create a strategic plan for safety.

By the time the safety roundtable had met for the first time this year, 15 fight videos had been uploaded to the Telegram chat.

“If there's any potential needs for revisions, we will definitely do that work over the course of the year,” Trunnell said.

She stood firm on the district’s disciplinary policy, which is based on the state’s education code, which California’s K-12 schools must comply with.

According to code, reasons for mandatory expulsions include possessing, selling or otherwise furnishing a firearm; brandishing a knife at another person; unlawfully selling a controlled substance; committing or attempting to commit a sexual assault or committing a sexual battery; and possession of an explosive.

“What we are doing is actually making sure that our staff is aware of the practices,” Trunnell said. “We have new administrators, so it's making sure that they get trained right on all of that and enforcing the language, which is ed code.”

Trunnell said she wants people to remember that discussions on discipline must consider the life impact on children, and it’s important to have compassion and understanding toward them.

“We try and serve every student from the individual level because at the end of the day, it will be our student and the family that is connected to our student that we’re wrapping our arms around,” she said.

She added that the district is making sure that students are aware of the resources available to them, which include school-based therapists, free meal programs and access to the STOPit app, which allows students to anonymously report bullying, hazing or other concerns to school administrators.

Santa Rosa City Schools has seen a 56% increase in the app’s usage compared to last year. According to district data, last school year from August to October, 49 reports from across the district were submitted through the app. This year, 111 reports were submitted in that timeframe.

“Students have a responsibility and role in keeping themselves and others safe as well,” Trunnell added. “I am listening and working with our school sites on how to help our youth make positive decisions for their well-being for those around them.”

District leaders also point to the use of restorative justice experts to prevent violence from happening. However, teachers, even those who agree with the philosophy of restorative justice, don’t think it’s being implemented effectively.

Jonathan Muchow, a longtime Santa Rosa High teacher, said he is a fan of restorative justice, when used correctly.

“Restorative justice relies on the people and parties involved wanting to repair a relationship with the other people or with the community at large,” he said. “But it seems to me like for too long, restorative justice has been looked at kind of as a silver bullet.”

“We need to not only have bodies, but have bodies that are informed about issues that are going on within students,” he said. “Obviously, we can't know all of them, but also they need to have a little bit of power to implement some consequences.”

Muchow added that expulsion should not be overused, “but I do think we're doing better with the discipline. I just don't know if the discipline is being effective at manipulating behavior change.”

Teachers feel ignored by district

Teachers say they’ve been urging safety changes long before Pienta’s death.

Less than six months before the fatal stabbing, Warmerdam, the Montgomery special education teacher, wrote a letter to the district, urging Trunnell to intervene on what Warmerdam called “a very critical point on campus.”

In her October 2022 letter, she described a scene where a mob of approximately 200 students began during the lunch period, “and started to storm around school, defying supervision, administrator and teacher requests to disperse.”

She called the event “extremely unsettling,” yet not surprising. The mobs had happened before.

Even so, she said an on-campus supervisor not named in her letter was “very scared” by the incident.

“He actually said there may have been a fatality on campus, if the student whom the mob was looking for was present at school,” Warmerdam wrote.

The chilling foreshadowing is not lost on Warmerdam, whose continued advocacy for the safety of her students, the reinstallment of the School Resource Officer program and the push for more campus supervisors has continued long after the tragic event last spring.

While a school resource officer, Santa Rosa Police Officer Luigi Valencia, was assigned to the Montgomery campus following Pienta’s death, the district did not request his services for the current school year.

In late June, district officials said they were “exploring the return” of the program, but as of Nov. 1, have not yet made a final decision.

Warmerdam and many of her students felt removing the resource officer was the wrong call by the district. They put together a group of letters about their safety concerns and sent them to Trunnell.

“It was really interesting; all of them pretty much talked about Officer Luigi and how he did make them feel more safe,” Warmerdam said.

Warmerdam isn’t the only teacher who feels they’ve begged the district to take action.

Santa Rosa High School government teacher Andy Brennan says he’s spent a lot of time advocating for more consistent on-campus safety measures, as well as advocating to bring back school resource officers.

Past safety response protocols on campus have been “inefficient” he said, because of the constant turnover of vice principals, who are typically given the responsibility of overseeing campus safety.

Brennan asked administration if he could manage school safety instead, given his 23 years of experience at the high school.

“I had argued that it's best to have actual people at the site who, with institutional knowledge, can run with a plan and keep it going,” Brennan said.

He was then appointed Santa Rosa High’s Safety Coordinator and currently is working on the site’s Comprehensive School Safety Plan, which also manages the school’s safety drills and response to major disasters.

He said the site administration is working with their teachers the best they can; they’ve expected barriers from the district for a long time.

“This seems to be a continual, cultural thing,” he said. “It's not just our district but also for a lot of different places, because the district is hamstrung by a couple of things: They have no job security, so they have to please the superintendent spot, who has to please whoever’s on the school board.”

A big push for Brennan is improving communication.

Fights are common at Santa Rosa High as they are at Slater and Montgomery, but Santa Rosa High social studies teacher Muchow feels that their teachers are often left more in the dark when an incident occurs.

“My colleagues and I know that there's issues, and we often hear about fights on campus or fights across the street from students more than we hear from administrators,” Muchow said. “I would feel safer knowing what's going on as opposed to (being in) the shadows.”

He and Brennan agree that it may boil down to district “culture.”

“It seems that we have a culture within Santa Rosa City Schools that has not been open and transparent,” Muchow said.

This sentiment is felt by teachers at other campuses in the district.

“When a bunch of us went to the school board meeting last month in response to the violence on our campus, we felt like we were being brushed off by the school board. The superintendent wouldn't make eye contact with us,” said Kaper, the Slater science teacher.

“It just feels like we aren't being given the level of concern that we feel like we should deserve. We feel like this is something where we are begging for help,” he said. “We're asking for SROs, we're asking for more consequences, and we get … It's just nothing in return.”

Trunnell said she has heard the concerns from teachers and is aware that much of the work to be done surrounds hiring more adult supervisors on school campuses.

“One of the challenges that we have faced is filling those positions,” Trunnell said. “(Now,) I'm happy to say we are steadily hiring individuals into these roles. We have more people in the roles than we had vacancies.”

The number of campus supervisors, restorative specialists, family engagement facilitators and school based therapists have all been increased, and the district is actively recruiting to fill the vacancies.

Of these positions, only the campus supervisors are specifically assigned to supervise outdoor areas during the school day.

Last school year, there were 15 campus supervisors across the district. The district increased that number to 27, but has only hired two supervisors since, totaling 17 across the district.

In hopes to respond to community feedback, Trunnell pointed to the many ongoing district committees, each aimed to tackle a specific initiative.

These committees on the district level are “ongoing,” Trunnell said, including the Superintendent's Advisory Network, Safety Advisory Roundtable Task (SART) Committee and an internal safety subcommittee with city officials, community organizations and the district.

“It seems like the (district) is always taking a lot of time to form a committee that's going to look into these things and discuss these things instead of taking action, and that's not gonna be enough to fix the bigger problems or their underlying causes because it's pretty nuanced,” Warmerdam said.

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

Report For America corps member Adriana Gutierrez covers education and child welfare issues for The Press Democrat. Reach her at Adriana.Gutierrez@PressDemocrat.com