Parents are pushing the return of school resource officers at Santa Rosa City Schools, but will the school board budge?

A group of about 15 parents filled Montgomery High School’s library in mid-October, with one goal in mind: to reinstate school resource officers on their campus.

Standing at the front of the room was Melissa Stewart, a parent of a sophomore at Montgomery, handing out pamphlets and the agenda for her group, the Safe Campus Alliance.

The group formed amid recent increases in violence on Santa Rosa City School campuses. It is made up of parents, students, teachers and community members who are concerned about student safety and are convinced that school resource officers could provide immediate relief.

“I'm listening to these (school) board meetings and it doesn't feel like our concerns were being addressed,” Stewart said. “It made me go: ‘I have to do something else. We need to do something.’”

Organized and passionate, she and the group have been taking their concerns directly to school board public comment sessions. Dressed in matching neon safety vests, they want to make sure their voices are heard loud and clear.

The Safe Campus Alliance has grown rapidly since its first meeting in Stewart’s small boutique in Montgomery Village. It has 353 Facebook members, and about 100 of those are actively involved, filling large portions of City Hall at school board meetings.

The group has attracted key figures to its planning sessions, including Santa Rosa City Schools Trustee Jeremy De La Torre, Police Chief John Cregan and City Council member Mark Stapp, all of whom have spoken with alliance members and answered questions.

But, among those organized parent conversations and public comments, there’s a voice that is frequently missing — that of students and parents of color, who stand to be affected the most whether SROs are reinstated or not.

The flashpoint

On March 1, Jayden Pienta, a 16-year-old Montgomery High School student, was fatally stabbed in an art class.

In the immediate aftermath, Cregan took to the podium at a news conference that afternoon alongside Superintendent Anna Trunnell.

Asked by a student why it had taken a loss of life to receive attention from city officials, Cregan took the opportunity to campaign for the return of their department’s school resource officer program.

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

Cregan was referring to the board’s June 2020 decision to suspend the school resource officer program.

That summer, Trustee Omar Medina launched a petition urging the district to end the relationship with the police department. The petition came in the wake of George Floyd’s death and nationwide protests against police brutality. But it also came in light of an alarming disparity in suspensions in the district.

Nearly three times as many Latino students were suspended as white students, even though the two groups make up an almost equal share of the district’s 10,179 students. Black students, who represented just 3% of secondary enrollment at the time, made up 7% of suspensions.

Critics also argued that the presence of armed and uniformed officers made students of color feel the opposite of safe — like they had targets on their back for the color of their skin.

Critics also contended that the officer presence fed into the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a phrase that describes the difference in the way students of color, particularly Black males, are disciplined in school. The phenomenon has been extensively researched and documented in dozens of academic journals.

In the end, the board voted 7-0 to halt the SRO program for reexamination.

Afterward, an ad hoc committee made up of teachers, students, parents, administrators and three board members — Laurie Fong, Alegria De La Cruz and Ed Sheffield — reviewed the program. The vast majority of the committee voted in August 2020 to continue with school resource officers but with significant modifications.

Ultimately, the board ignored the committee’s advice and decided not to renew the contract — which had expired in June 2019 — with the City of Santa Rosa, which fully paid for the school resource officers.

That was met with frustration among those who believed the program was critical to campus safety, including some who agreed the program needed improvements.

“I think there's just been this misconception that we just chose to stop the program,” Medina said in an interview with The Press Democrat. “In effect, that's what happened. That wasn't the status of the board. It was that we would address some issues with the city to see how the program could come back, if that’s what we chose.”

However, with the pandemic in full swing, all energy was focused on shifting to virtual learning, and then reopening schools, Medina said. Bringing back the SRO program and working out the modifications was simply not a priority.

With the passage of time, new faces emerged in leadership roles ― Trunnell became superintendent, Cregan became police chief, and three new members were elected to the board.

“Now, unfortunately, a lot is occurring in the schools,” Medina said. “And, well, we are where we are.”

Feelings of frustration

When Pienta died this past spring, it added to many of the feelings of frustration and disappointment with what was seen as a lack of action by the board.

A wrongful-death lawsuit by Pienta’s family points blame for their son’s death directly at the board and its decision to remove school resource officers. According to the complaint, the removal of SROs contributed to a failure to curb student violence during school hours and fueled an unsafe school environment at the high school, which served 1,572 students last year.

But at the same time last spring, the former interim principal Laurie Fong, also a former trustee, was allowed to bring a school resource officer on campus for the rest of the school year to make students feel safer in the wake of Pienta’s death.

The Santa Rosa Police Department decided the perfect person for the job would be Officer Luigi Valencia, a bilingual cop who grew up in Santa Rosa and has a background in youth counseling. Many parents and students who sang his praises, expected him to return for the first day of school this year. They were disappointed when he didn’t.

“I'm hearing from so many people that having Luigi back on campus was like a small thing to do in a bigger issue,” said Stewart, the Safe Campus Alliance organizer. “He would be a tool in a large toolbox.”

Montgomery students have taken it into their own hands to give the school board an accurate read on how they feel on bringing a cop back onto campus.

Two student leaders in the school’s Associated Student Body Culture Committee created a survey that asked students : “Would you be fine with any School Resource Officer (SRO’s) on campus?” and “Do you want Officer Luigi back on campus?” A third question asked students to identify their race.

Lulia Embaye, one of two directors on Montgomery’s ASB Culture Committee said the survey was spread by teachers, student leaders in other campus organizations and by word of mouth.

Nearly half of the Montgomery student body, or 576 students responded. Of those, 89.2% said that they would be fine with any school resource officer on campus and 92.1% said they wanted Officer Luigi back.

Of the students who replied, only 311 identified their race. 36.3% of students identified as Latino, 40.2% identified as white, 10% identified as a race not listed; 7.1% identified as African American, and 6.4% identified as Asian.

Chief Cregan, who attended a Safe Campus Alliance meeting in October at the New Vintage Church, spoke passionately to the crowd of parents filling rows of folding chairs.

“The Santa Rosa Police Department is 100% supportive of creating an SRO program,” Cregan told them. “I 100% believe in it deeply to my heart. I want to work with the school board; I want to work with our City Council; I want to work with our community.

“We're at a moment right now where we've had, over the last three years, a lot of kicking the can down the road, a lot of excuses, a lot of finger pointing. … I think now's the time that the door’s opening for some change.

“What I don't want to do is wait for there to be another act of violence on a school campus. Before something happens, let's act now,” Cregan continued. “We can't see another death. We don't need another one. So let's come together.”

Stewart added that it’s important for her to see the board members as people who want the same things they want: safe campuses, and they just want to spark a conversation in a civil way to come up with the best programs to increase safety, which they believe includes, but is not limited to, the school resource officers.

“Our goal is really to be very respectful, and to have accurate information,” Stewart said. “I just heard so many different people coming to board meetings and yelling and just being so disrespectful and I'm like no one's gonna hear us. I don't listen to people that talk that way.”

At the same time, looking at the group’s attendees at each meeting, the lack of diversity is apparent.

During one of the most recent meetings, Trustee De La Torre told the parent group: “Don’t be dismissive of the hurts felt by communities of color. … The wounds that have been inflicted cannot be dismissed, regardless of when they were.”

‘You’re probably going to profile me’

Those wounds are deep.

“When I hear the word police, I automatically think: You're probably going to profile me because I'm brown skinned, black haired and have a disability,” said Demian Argueta, a junior at Santa Rosa High School.

He sat on a bench in the high school’s outdoor quad in mid-November. Beside him was Ome Zuniga, also a junior and president of the school’s Activism Club, which both students belong to.

The two attended the November Santa Rosa City Schools’ board meeting just a week prior.

“During school board meetings, the people that show up are very pro-SRO,” Zuniga said. “And it's so scary. Because it's just a huge misrepresentation.

“A lot of the time, student voices aren't as heard as adult voices,” he continued. “And we're the students. It's our school.”

As president of the Activism Club, Zuniga has focused a significant part of the group’s recent work on speaking out against the reinstatement of SROs.

He also is the son of a district board trustee, Alegria De La Cruz, who is public about her disdain for the SRO program.

“We have to understand that there's a continuum of experiences and definitions of safety,” De La Cruz said. “I think with what we're hearing right now, it looks like an officer in uniform with a gun. I think that definition doesn't necessarily look like safety to a lot of people.”

“We don't need guns on campus if we're trying to keep them off in the first place. We just need adults,” Zuniga said.

Both Zuniga and Argueta described a feeling of discomfort and hypervigilance around police. They said their experience of high school would dramatically change if a police officer were present at Santa Rosa High.

Renee Saucedo, a community organizer with the nonprofit Raizes Collective, says she hears a similar sentiment from the parents of students in various Sonoma County school districts.

“I'm around people in our community every day,” Saucedo said. “And what I hear them say, when it comes to SROs, police on campus, is that they overwhelmingly disagree with the presence of law enforcement.”

She said many of the families she interacts with are of Latino, immigrant and Indigenous communities. These families often work more than one job or are monolingual Spanish speakers, she said, making the public school board conversations around SROs inaccessible.

But the discomfort around police is ever present in Sonoma County’s Latino communities, Saucedo said.

“I hear countless youth saying that it makes things worse when law enforcement, including SROs, are present,” she said. “They say they feel targeted, and they feel like they're treated like criminals rather than young people who are simply at school trying to move ahead.”

Disparate treatment

Research in the past decade does show disproportionate punishment for students of color and students with disabilities on high school campuses with school resource officers.

A 2020 study by the Justice Policy Institute found that high schools with a population between 25% and 50% of Black or Latino youth had a disproportionately higher presence of SROs.

The same Justice Policy Institute study also showed that disproportionate rates of arrest for nonviolent behaviors,low-level incidents that would typically be handled by school administrators, were instead handed to officers, who would “criminalize ordinary youthful behavior.”

When the SRO program was active in the Santa Rosa district, no data was collected on whether the police department’s disciplinary efforts affected a certain demographic of students.

“There's lots of research out there. And the pushback is that, well, this isn't our data,” Medina said. “The other issue (is) we don't have data. … There's nothing in the MOU about metrics and data collection, and how do we measure? How do we know if our program is doing well or not?”

Even without data, it’s apparent there was an issue with boundaries, Medina said.

“Some of the concerns were the overuse of police where sometimes things that needed to be done by staff, they would bring in the officers to do,” Medina said.

Cregan agreed that clearer boundaries need to be drawn and a stronger line of communication needs to exist between school administration and officers stationed at schools.

“One of the things that we struggled with in the past is where sometimes teachers would have low-level offenses in the classroom and they would call the SRO for it,” Cregan said. “I want to make it clear, we are not there for kids using their cellphones in class … we're not there for them running in the hallways or (when) they're late for class.”

Cregan shared an ongoing list of other proposed changes to the program with The Press Democrat; a significant number of the ideas surround increased training for officers.

“Sending them to more training on the developing adolescent mind and brain … having more of that expertise — or really a focus — on crisis, intervention, de-escalation,” Cregan said.

“We already sent all of our officers to an implicit bias course in a procedural justice course,” he continued. “(We’re) really focusing on some of the implicit biases that are inherent for all human beings in society, what we can do to make sure that we're not seeing that introduced to our school system, and certainly in no way shape or form, ever introducing it to an officer's decision to make an arrest on the school campus.”

“Not every police officer will make a good SRO, without a doubt,” Cregan said. “Some officers don't have the right demeanor for the expertise for it. We want to select the people who can work with children and focus on restorative justice models, de-escalation and not using force.”

Cregan’s other proposed changes included creating a public dashboard that tracks arrests on campuses; notifies students of their rights when it comes to search and seizure and police use of force; reinstates information about drunken driving, consent and gang involvement; and installing an officer to oversee the program.

It’s likely Officer Luigi will lead the program, Cregan said.

“I wouldn't put my name on something or be a part of a team that I felt was doing a disservice to youth,” Luigi said. “So if I felt like I was with an officer who was working at Carillo, or Elsie or Piner (and) I feel like they’re not adequate … either you remove them or you remove me.”

Luigi’s family therapy certification and experience running juvenile diversion programs created a unique skill set for him to work with Santa Rosa students and form connections with them.

He feels proud about the work he was able to do in a few months last spring, and was hoping it would continue in the new school year.

“There's a lot of resources that I was able to give, like we don't want to get this kid into the juvenile system,” Luigi said. “Let’s get them back to some support; that’s what they need. They have issues at home and issues here, here and there.”

He credited a lot of his success to his background, both in his ability to identify with Latino students on the Montgomery campus and his previous education and training in psychology.

The word “unicorn” is often used to describe Officer Luigi by board members who say it may not be feasible to find enough officers on the Santa Rosa PD who have the same qualifications.

“I'm sure Luigi is freaking amazing, but I think somebody even in the board meeting said he's like a unicorn,” Medina said. “Even though SROs have additional training, it's not the reality of what they are. They’re not all marriage and family therapists.”

“I've been called a unicorn,” Luigi said. “‘You have your master's in clinical psychology or licensed therapists. Your department doesn't have that.’ I've heard that. And that's a valid point.”

Current progress

Despite the momentum, there is no solid plan for Santa Rosa City Schools board members to discuss or vote on.

An ad hoc committee between the district and City of Santa Rosa was formed over the summer to discuss solutions to school safety, including reinstating the SRO program.

It’s made up of trustees De La Torre, Medina and De La Cruz. Mayor Natalie Rogers and City Council members Dianna MacDonald and Jeff Okrepkie also are on the committee.

“Right now we're kind of where we're trying to listen and understand the issue from all points,” Medina said.

Rogers, who has spoken in favor of reinstating SROs, did not respond to requests for comment.

In the Oct. 25 board meeting, De La Torre asked to place an item about SROs on the agenda so he could hear the other trustees’ perspectives. So far, there has been no discussion item added.

“Putting an SRO on campus is not going to guarantee that something bad does not happen,” De La Torre told The Press Democrat. “Yes, it adds another security measure to campus, but that doesn't take any bad situation away because there's an SRO. I always saw the greatest strength of an SRO program is building community with the students and the staff and the community as a whole and building positive relationships. I always thought that was a good thing for the SROs. If there's a version of that that can come back, I think it would be great.”

Bella Clark, an officer of the Associated Student Body at Montgomery High, said she and a group of 12 students in favor of SROs have collected data and, despite attending board meetings to voice their efforts, “we have noticed no change on our campus since March 1st and we are tired.”

After their efforts, Medina reached out to have a meeting with the student group to discuss their opposing opinions on Thursday.

“This meeting was a long and argumentative process, and we feel he is still not hearing our voices,” Clark said.

Medina, trustee of Area 4 ― a portion of south Santa Rosa, west of U.S. 101 and east of Bennett Valley ― said he’s open to an SRO program with serious modifications, but he also has major concerns about the impact to all students, so he has not come to a final decision.

“I don't want our schools to be like prisons,” Medina said. “I don't want them to be caged. We’re already fencing them more, we already have cameras. I don’t want people with guns walking around on campus, whether they’re officers or not. These are supposed to be environments for learning.”

Area 3 Trustee De La Cruz ― who represents north Santa Rosa schools ― believes programs that support students and families in other ways should be the focus.

“I think it's really important to make sure that our community as a whole is facing this data around racial disproportionality and asking the hard questions as to why there are underlying causes for school violence or for violence in children,” she said. “That's a symptom — it's not going to be met with a solution that's just about criminalizing that behavior.”

Lack of alternative solutions

While parents and students within the Santa Rosa City Schools district continue waiting for the board to make a decision on the return of school resource officers, they’re urging alternative safety measures in the meantime.

“We have a shortage of campus supervisors. We have a shortage in restorative justice. And that's, I think, the biggest thing. If we had trained adults, trained in de-escalation, they can be campus supervisors, they can be restorative justice,” said Zuniga, the junior at Santa Rosa High. “We need a tool that's an approach with healing.”

While the number of allocated campus supervisor positions has increased at most campuses, many positions remain unfilled. At $18.79 per hour, some are worried that wages aren’t enough to make the position desirable.

“I think we need to do better in terms of paying our staff better,” Medina said. “But those are things that aren't necessarily immediately within our control. These are things that we have to negotiate on.”

Restorative justice specialists also are needed across the district.

“We're working to really try to increase the positions that help address those causes of violence and the trauma a lot of students are dealing with: therapists, counselors, restoration specialists, family engagement facilitators,” Medina said. “We’re trying, but the difficulties are around getting people hired, not only in a timely fashion, but a problem is we’re using as much of our budget as we can.”

Besides filling supervisor and support positions on campuses, multiple board members could not identify alternative solutions to improving safety.

“I feel personally that there seems to be a lot of stall tactics,” Stewart said. “And a bit of ‘We'll start another committee.’

“We don't want another committee,” she added. “The polls and what I'm hearing do not reflect what the board is choosing to do. And as a member of the community, that is frustrating, let alone being a parent.

“I feel like someone's gonna get hurt again, that’s my biggest concern. And seconds matter.”

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