Santa Rosa students, parents and teachers are angry and traumatized over school violence. Will anything change?

But it is clear that a culture of violence has escalated throughout the district.

Video footage obtained by The Press Democrat shows that student fights at Montgomery and other schools had been ongoing, often recorded on cellphones as peers huddled to watch students brawl.

That violence continued even after March 1, with 86 fight videos posted to Telegram, an encrypted chat server, since then.

Fears over school violence also were fueled by several incidents that took place across the district in the final months of last school year.

The same day as the stabbing, police arrested a Maria Carrillo High School student for bringing a gun on campus.

The following week, two Montgomery students were found with knives and sent home before school officials reported the incident to police. Over the following weekend, Paulson and Ahlborn were placed on paid administrative leave. Ahlborn eventually returned, but Paulson agreed to resign.

A few months later in May, teachers described “a melee” at Montgomery’s feeder middle school, Herbert Slater, during the lunch period. Dozens of students participated in fights as teachers and administrators struggled to break up students.

“It was 30 minutes of chaos,” said Tami Axthelm, a 12-year veteran teacher at Slater, at the time. “It was kids running the show.”

Summer vacation provided an opportunity for teachers and students in the district to process and regroup.

Before the new school year began, Montgomery seniors returned to campus to paint their "senior steps."

As they talked on a hot August day, the seniors hoped for a normal school year, free of violence, lockdowns and disruptions.

But the fighting did not cease. Police say the number of students caught with weapons on campus actually increased, along with gang-related violence in Santa Rosa.

From the beginning of 2023 to November, there were 1,308 calls for service and officer-initiated events at Santa Rosa City Schools campuses, according to data from the Santa Rosa Police Department.

On Nov. 29, a Santa Rosa High School student attacked another student with a kitchen knife on the west side of campus near the school’s baseball and football fields. Officials said the fight was gang related and one student was arrested, the other hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

That same day, an anonymous tip led to the arrest of a Montgomery student on suspicion of having a knife on campus.

Just one week later, on Dec. 7, Herbert Slater Middle School went into lockdown and three students were arrested after two students started a gang-related fight inside a classroom with another schoolmate who ended up brandishing a knife and fleeing campus. It was eerily reminiscent of the Montgomery stabbing.

This led to another round of protests at Santa Rosa middle and high schools, with many teachers across Slater and Montgomery calling out sick in the following days.

Educators say they had been warning district officials about the rising violence among youth who were coming back to socialization after COVID-19 lockdowns, which severely disrupted their education and abilities to cope with academic stress in an in-person setting.

But trouble had been brewing long before that.

SRO timeline

In 2020, a string of Santa Rosa peaceful protests was met with excessive force and unlawful detentions at the hands of Santa Rosa Police Department officers, according to an investigation by Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights.

The city’s actions against the backdrop of a national reckoning of race and policing led school leaders to reexamine the 30-year-old school resource officer program, which stationed Santa Rosa Police officers at each of the district’ high schools.

Trustee Omar Medina led the call to remove campus officers from Santa Rosa City Schools campuses. He was backed by trustees Alegría De La Cruz and Ed Sheffield, both of who, remain on the board.

There were many factors that informed Medina’s decision, including the actions of local police, national tensions over policing, and district data that showed disproportionate suspension rates among students of color.

“I think this is 100% the right thing to do given the state of law enforcement and the state of race relations in our society,” Medina said in 2020. “I want them out of our schools.”

The contract between the city and the school district expired in June 2019. Trustees decided not to renew the contract until they gathered more information about the program’s effectiveness.

By August 2020, the board voted unanimously to suspend the program until a new contract with significant modifications could be drawn up.

Until Pienta’s death three years later, no modifications or timeline on the program’s return had been announced to the public, leading to widespread criticism about a lack of action.

“We used to say before it happened, directly to the board in board meetings or in letters to the board: ‘What is it going to take for you to take us seriously? Does someone have to die?’” said Janelle Payne, a Montgomery High history teacher who has long advocated for more safety measures. “And then someone died on campus. It’s absolutely tragic, and it’s absolutely infuriating.”

In the days following Pienta’s death, community members said campus officers could have prevented the tragedy, and turned to the district for answers.

Trustees moved quickly, creating a committee — called the Safety Advisory Round Table — consisting of students, staff and community leaders to address concerns brought on by residents in district listening sessions after the tragedy.

A third committee, a private group of Santa Rosa city leaders and district administration also formed.

As the committees met and listened, incidents of violence continued. Teachers and staff begged district officials to implement safety measures; they asked for more adults on campus to prevent another tragedy.

District officials did increase the number of campus supervisors at each high school. But with low hourly rates, most of the positions remained unfilled.

It wasn’t until the classroom attack at Herbert Slater in early December that teachers, staff, students and parents banded together. Teachers arranged sick-outs, students took to the streets to picket, and parents began organizing advocacy groups.

Pressure boiled over from all sides.

The city steps in

Santa Rosa City Manager Maraskeisha Smith wrote a public letter to Trunnell Dec. 7, urging the district to move forward with the school resource officer program and pair it with other wraparound resources for students. Santa Rosa’s Mayor Natalie Rodgers said she no longer felt the committees were effective in finding a solution to improve campus safety.

Much of the community had a similar message for the district: They wanted action.

“The Santa Rosa Teachers Association does want SROs on our school campuses,” said Santa Rosa Teachers Association President Kathryn Howell at the Dec. 13 board meeting.

“It’s not the whole solution — it's part of the system,” she continued. “We need a holistic approach. We need to give our students what they need. And we're afraid that all of the other services we want our students to have are getting lost in the noise.”

At that meeting, Trunnell shared the data from the three committees. She also noted the vacancies of campus supervisors, family engagement facilitators and restorative justice specialists.

But the five-hour meeting was spent mostly in discussion, listening to attendees, like Howell, share their experiences.

But the voices were far from unified.

Members of the Sonoma chapter of the NAACP stood with student activists who said police officers would contribute to an unsafe campus environment for students of color and would feed the school-to-prison pipeline.

Ultimately, Trustee Jeremy De La Torre took the lead in moving for the “exploration and immediate implementation of an SRO pilot program” that will work cooperatively with the city of Santa Rosa. Five trustees voted in favor of De La Torre’s proposal.

Board President Medina and De La Cruz — voted no. Both have remained steadfast in their decision to keep officers out of schools, citing concerns over police racial bias among other issues.

A timeline on exactly when the pilot program will start is unclear, as district officials told The Press Democrat following the board meeting that it will take more conversations with the city. Santa Rosa Police officials said it could take up to six months for the program to roll out.

Counteractive equity policies

Some say the wave of violence is the product of equity issues that have plagued the district for years — and the unintended consequences of policies that tried to address them.

The disparities are evident in the data, which is startling: 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 students. Black students, who represented just 3% of secondary enrollment at the time, accounted for 7% of suspensions.

But now teachers say the lack of meaningful discipline that resulted has adversely affected student behavior.

“I’m not saying suspension is the answer for everything, but if a student brings a knife to school — we have students getting a one- or two-day suspension,” said Logan Kaper, a Herbert Slater science teacher. “We need some more serious consequences.”

School safety isn’t the only conversation educators are pushing to the forefront. They say the district's stringent graduation requirements — put in place five years ago — need to be reconsidered.

In 2018, the district faced data that showed many students of color were graduating but were ineligible for college. While there were options for students to take college-preparatory classes at all five of the high schools, Hispanic students, in particular, were not taking advantage of them.

So the district decided to funnel all students into the same four-year curriculum of rigorous college preparatory courses to meet the University of California and California State University admission standards by the time they graduated.

“Our graduation requirements set that base and foundation as an expectation for all students that they would at least have the ability to have choice, and options, even if they decided later that they didn't want to go on to college,” Trunnell said.

The move stripped nearly all remedial classes, and teachers say the policy led to a culture of hopelessness among students who are failing that gets worse each year.

“We get kids coming into high school that have failed every single class in seventh and eighth grade. Now you're going to plop them in a ninth grade class, and it's college prep?” asked Kris Bertsch, a longtime Santa Rosa High counselor.

“We have fewer students now going straight to a four-year college than we did before,” she said. “The only difference is that our graduation rate has plummeted. And our school safety and kid engagement has plummeted.”

Almost 35% of the district’s students are not on track to graduate, and although a last-minute move to approve a waiver dropping the last third year of math and second year of foreign language has spared about 61 seniors, teachers say they’re not enough.

At a special board meeting Dec. 20, teachers begged the district to make the waivers permanent.

Sonoma County students also have faced years of trauma, which have affected their ability to meet graduation requirements. The pandemic, political stressors and years of recurring wildfires all contributed to learning loss, many educators say.

Graduation requirements only add to these traumas, and further exacerbate mental health issues and campus violence, teachers say.

“You see kids that would otherwise be motivated by football or basketball or baseball … now they don't have grades to be on the team,” said Payne, the Montgomery history teacher. “So now that doesn't engage them. They don't get the discipline from that, they don’t get the social development from that.”

“And who’s outside the hallways during class?” another Montgomery teacher, Jim La France asked. “Kids that don't want to go to class because they're not passing.”

Teachers at the Dec. 20 meeting expressed the same sentiment: The policy is a disadvantage to many of their students, who are told as early as their sophomore year that there’s no way they’ll graduate.

The trustees responded by waiving the graduation requirements for the next two years.

In the meantime, Trunnell said the district would try to increase options; improve communication with elementary districts to better prepare students for high school; increase alternative education options and create a committee to hear from students, teachers and counselors about their recommendations.

Trusteeships up for grabs

Frustrated community members have frequently brought up their own collective power to take back power at the ballot box.

Four trusteeships are up for election in November including the seats held by De La Cruz, De La Torre, Ever Flores and Sheffield.

When the Press Democrat reached out to each trustee about their reelection plans, only De La Torre responded.

“I do plan on running for election (in) November 2024 to keep my board seat representing the 7th district for Santa Rosa City Schools,” he wrote. “I am running to continue to work with this board and do better by our students, staff and community. … I want to continue to do the work and ensure all voices are heard, represented and positive change is enacted not just discussed.”

De La Torre was appointed to the board after the March 1 incident, when Trustee Laurie Fong stepped down to become Montgomery High’s interim principal in the weeks following the tragedy.

De La Cruz also was appointed to fill a vacant seat in 2019 after the previous trustee left to fill an interim principal role at a local charter school. She then ran unopposed in 2020.

She has since been a fierce advocate for students of color in the district, pushing for ethnic studies curriculum and language-immersive educational models.

In the past few years, De La Cruz has faced community backlash over her opposition to bringing campus officers back. She has stressed the negative impact that police presence may have on students of color.

Flores, vice president of the board, is a counselor at Healdsburg High School who ran against two-term incumbent Jenni Klose in 2020.

Flores, who immigrated from El Salvador as a teenager, has been an advocate for data-informed decisions and has emphasized the importance of ethnic studies; dual immersion language programs; agricultural programs; and education in the visual and performing arts.

Sheffield was first elected in 2016 and is the longest serving trustee on the board and a parent of two boys in the district. He ran again unopposed in 2020.

2024: What's to come

After the boisterous Dec. 13 school board meeting, the district agreed to pursue two major projects in the upcoming year — they would explore and implement a pilot school resource officer program, and they would study the expansion of alternative education programs.

The pilot program may not come to fruition for at least six months, according to police officials, who will need time to gather and train their officers. It’s not clear yet who will fund the pilot program, which was previously supported by the city.

The district has not announced how they will study alternative education programs, which are few and far between. De La Cruz proposed the study during the December meeting, and trustees voted unanimously to go forward.

The move comes after teacher and parent complaints that there’s not enough options for struggling students.

Where the district will find funding for these future programs is murky.

All 40 districts in Sonoma County may see the effects of budget cuts next school year, with recent notification of a cost of living adjustment significantly lower than this school year.

The adjustment, which boosts a school district’s funding by taking into account yearly inflation, will decrease around 7% in the next fiscal year, which starts in July. In 2023, the adjustment was 8.22% but next year, it’s expected to be only 1.27%.

This means districts may have to pull money from their reserves or possibly go into a deficit, said Sarah Lampenfeld, director of external fiscal services at the Sonoma County Office of Education. She oversees the office’s team of financial advisers who work with the county’s 40 school districts on their budgets.

This adjustment, paired with the local control funding model and declining enrollment (which impacts per pupil dollars) means districts have tighter budgets each year, and will be forced to choose which programs and services need to be cut.

“That is the reality,” Lampenfeld said.

She added that schools are still benefiting from one-time federal COVID funds, which funded services to help students recover from learning loss, stress and other impacts of the pandemic.

Those student needs have not gone away; however, the funding will.

In the next 12 months, school districts will also see the expiration of these one-time funds.

“They're making the best they can with the dollars that they have, trying to stretch the one-time dollars as far as they can,” Lampenfeld said. “I have seen them strongly focusing on that, meaning school districts are like, ‘Wait, can we afford that? What else would we have to give up?’ Because that's the reality at the moment.”

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 Alana Minkler at 707-526-8531 or alana.minkler@pressdemocrat.com. On X, formerly Twitter, @alana_minkler.