Santa Rosa school board endorses return of campus officers but timeline, next steps unclear

A five-member majority favored bringing campus officers back, but a launch timeline is unclear as district officials say it will take more conversations with the city, and city officials said it could take up to six months to roll out.|

ADRIANA GUTIERREZ AND PAULINA PINEDA

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

December 15, 2023

Where they stand on school safety measures

Here is how the seven trustees for Santa Rosa City Schools have staked out their positions on school resource officers, or SROs, and other safety measures in response to campus violence. Four members are up for election in 2024: Jeremy De La Torre, Ed Sheffield, Alegría De La Cruz and Ever Flores.

Omar Medina: In a November interview with The Press Democrat, Medina said he was open to a school resource officer program with serious modifications, but that he also had major concerns about the impact campus officers may have on students of color. At the time, he had not come to a final decision.

“I don’t want our schools to be like prisons,” he said.

He voted Wednesday against the pilot program to restore campus officers.

Ever Flores: “There’s no doubt that increased adult supervision on school sites makes our schools safer,” Flores said in a written statement last month, pointing to the increase in adult supervision positions dedicated to school safety.

“As we hear from stakeholders and review real-world outcomes from other districts, the usage of school resource officers is just one of the tools we’re looking at to make Santa Rosa City Schools safe for our entire community,” he said.

He voted in favor of restoring campus officers.

Alegría De La Cruz: She has staunchly opposed the return of SRO’s since voting to suspend the program in 2020, and did so again in her vote Wednesday night. She has instead asked that the board bolster restorative practices and focus on the at-risk youth who act out.

“This is not a solution that works, having cops in schools,” she said at the meeting.

Roxanne McNally: McNally has remained mostly silent on her personal stance of bringing back SROs. At Wednesday night’s meeting, she spoke out for the first time.

She recognized her identity as a white woman on a board where the majority are people of color.

“The SRO programs that I’ve read about do not include the modifications we’ve seen presented,” McNally said. “We don't have data on the impact of SROs in our community but if we were to revisit a program, we could collect it. So I’m open to this idea. I’m open to exploring it — with the modifications.”

She voted in favor or returning officers to schools.

Ed Sheffield: He has often cited a survey from 2020 that showed 8% of students had a negative experience of the district’s school resource program when it was active. He referred to the 8% — what equates to roughly 800 students — as crucial to the conversation, to hear and consider their concerns.

He voted in favor of the pilot program Wednesday night but noted it cannot go forward the way it had been before the program’s suspension in 2020.

Stephanie Manieri: She has pointed to the district and city’s joint committee on school safety, and its exploration of campus officer programs when asked for her stance on whether cops ought to be reinstated

At Wednesday’s meeting, she voted in favor of a pilot program but listed modifications to be considered to the program including bias training, including a public facing dashboard for officer accountability and using the support of SCOE to inform best practices.

Jeremy De La Torre: He introduced the motion Wednesday to reinstate campus officers through a pilot program. He said he was still concerned about the implications for communities of color.

"Putting an SRO on campus is not going to guarantee that something bad does not happen,” he told The Press Democrat last month. “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 can come back, I think it would be great.”

A five-member majority of the Santa Rosa City Schools board of trustees late Wednesday endorsed bringing forward a pilot program to reintroduce police officers to campuses as hundreds of community members, including students, parents and district staff pressed for immediate action to curb school violence.

A launch timeline is unclear, however, as district officials say it will take more conversations with the city, and city officials said it could take up to six months for a campus officer program to roll out.

In the meantime, Superintendent Anna Trunnell hasn’t announced any immediate plans to keep officers — who were redeployed to high school campuses this week until the winter break — at schools through the academic year.

It’s unknown what a pilot program will look like or what campuses will be affected once school resource officers, or SROs, do return. The question of cost and who pays also is likely to be a contentious conversation between the district and city.

“Funding was something that was brought up — that’s no secret,” Trunnell said in an interview Thursday. “I believe that we have willing partners, and it's just a matter of working out a timeline and making sure that we're doing things in a very fiscally responsible way.”

Wednesday’s meeting, tense at times and bogged down by board confusion and crossfire late into the night, marked the most pivotal moment in an escalating public debate over safety at Santa Rosa’s public schools since a student was fatally stabbed at Montgomery High School in March. A series of campus lockdowns and school violence this academic year have underscored the concerns, the latest occurring at Herbert Slater Middle School Wednesday morning, where a 14-year-old student from a crosstown middle school trespassed onto campus with a knife, police said.

At the 6 p.m. start of the trustees’ meeting every seat in the City Council chambers was filled, with scores of audience members spilling out into the cold, dark courtyard, waiting for their chance to testify.

Some 80 speakers made various demands of the board to take quick action on school safety. Many asked for school resource officers to return full time, while some opposed the campus officers and instead asked that the district bolster restorative justice practices and other types of student assistance.

In the end, about 11:30 p.m., after hours of public comment and deliberation by the trustees, the board endorsed forming a pilot program to reintroduce school resource officers, reviving in some form a partnership with the Santa Rosa Police Department that was suspended and ultimately ended in late 2020 amid a nationwide, pandemic-era reckoning over policing.

Some of the same members who made that decision three years ago formed the majority who backed new Trustee Jeremy De La Torre’s motion Thursday to return officers to city schools. They included trustees Ed Sheffield and Stephanie Manieri, joined by Ever Flores, who was elected in 2020, and Roxanne McNally, who was elected in 2022. De La Torre was appointed this year to fill a board vacancy.

“I want to say that I heard all of you tonight,” Flores said. “I took copious notes of what you've gone through, the trauma that we have gone through as a community.”

The two who remained in opposition were Omar Medina, who earlier in the evening was appointed board president, and Alegría De La Cruz. They have staunchly opposed reintroducing campus officers, citing concerns over police racial bias among other issues.

“This is not a solution that works, having cops in schools,” De La Cruz said.

Melissa Stewart, an organizer of the parent-led advocacy group Safe Campus Alliance, which has ramped up its public campaign for greater school safety measures, was guarded about acknowledging any step forward by the district Wednesday.

The late-night vote, one of two cast by the board before midnight, came amid a cloud of dueling motions and legal questions raised about the trustees’ action, confounding the audience and even the district’s chief administrator, Trunnell.

“Moving forward, what are we agreeing on? What can we implement immediately and not have another committee?” Stewart said in an interview Thursday. “We need to see some real concrete things put in as soon as possible for these teachers and the students.”

Santa Rosa Police Chief John Cregan said it would likely take about six months to find funding and select officers for any campus team and ramp up the program to launch at the start of the 2024-25 school year.

Cregan has publicly pushed for the return of school officers, and was joined last week by his boss, City Manager Maraskeshia Smith, who sent Trunnell a letter urging district action on that front and others to improve safety issues. Santa Rosa Mayor Natalie Rogers also chimed at that time, saying ongoing work by a district-city study committee was not the way forward and voicing her support for campus officers.

Cregan on Thursday said he thought Santa Rosa’s program could be a new model for such efforts.

“As we saw mentioned last night, there’s been a lot of finger pointing over the last three years and I want to move past that and work toward a collective partnership with district, parents and community members to build back a better program,” he said.

Smith on Thursday said she received a request from the district for a meeting, but that it likely won’t be scheduled until after the new year. She would wait for official direction from policymakers before moving forward, she said.

Local social justice advocates, meanwhile, want to ensure that campus officers are held accountable, and that students of color are not disproportionately caught up in enforcement efforts, as has happened elsewhere in the nation with officers on campus.

Karym Sanchez, lead organizer with the nonprofit North Bay Organizing Project and a parent of a Montgomery student, opposed the return of officers and said the program would impact Black and Latino students most and lead to increased suspensions and expulsions.

Sanchez, who waited outside nearly three hours to address the board on Wednesday night, is part of a coalition of parents and community members that also includes members from the NAACP Santa Rosa-Sonoma County Chapter and Raizes Collective.

The coalition wants to see restorative justice programs expanded districtwide instead.

Sanchez said the discussion around school safety has lacked input from vulnerable students and those most at-risk of having negative interactions with police. He also wanted to provide an alternative voice to pro-campus officer groups like the Safe Campus Alliance.

“I know there’s a difference around the SRO issue but what we want is the same — school safety,” Sanchez said.

Cregan acknowledged concerns raised about impacts on marginalized students and said he’s open to incorporating that feedback into the plan, adding that discussions about what the program should look like should include all voices, even those opposed.

The school resource officer proposal by De La Torre was one of two dueling motions made at the end of Wednesday’s meeting.

The board also unanimously endorsed De La Cruz’s proposal to study formation of alternative education programs, including small school environments that could cater to the needs of the most troubled kids.

That came after some pointed back-and-forth between audience members and De La Cruz, who told audience members they needed to educate themselves.

“Take ethnic studies,” she said. “Understand the root causes of these systems … Be educated. Be educated in our history.”

At that point several audience members interjected and asked her why some of the alternative proposals she favored had not been implemented.

“We have the capacity and we have the space to create alternative systems within Santa Rosa City Schools tomorrow,” she said.

“Then do it! Then do it!” several audience members said. De La Cruz rose and stepped away from her seat, returning minutes later.

Trunnell was directed by trustees to provide updates to current programs aiming to support school safety as a whole, including the district’s restorative programs, the multi-tier support services program and a program which increases access to culturally responsive mental health services for students and families.

Trunnell also was asked to formally gather information from students while officers are placed on campus through next week about how law enforcement presence makes them feel.

“We’ve been very clear as parents, teachers and students that are aligned in having more safety resource implementations and programs, not just SRO’s,” said Stewart, of the Safe Campus Alliance’s recent advocacy.

“Now we know where everyone stands … To see what the board members were actually voting on, really, really clarified for us who’s open to real discussion and who might need to have somebody run against them or possibly be recalled.”

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

You can reach Staff Writer Paulina Pineda at 707-521-5268 or paulina.pineda@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @paulinapineda22.