What needs to happen to ensure Sonoma County schools are safe? Here is what parents, students, school officials and teachers have to say

It was the worst act of violence on a Sonoma County school campus in living memory.

Two Montgomery High School students entered an art class March 1 and started a fight that left one of them mortally wounded, the other injured and a third student behind bars facing charges of voluntary manslaughter.

The killing shook students, parents, teachers, school staff, administrators and the county at-large.

Last week, frustrated students poured into the streets by the thousands, chanting, “What do we want? Safe schools.” They were the county’s largest local youth-led marches since those that erupted after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

Parents excoriated school administrators and the school board. There were furious calls for the SRO program, which was disbanded in 2020, also in the wake of Floyd’s killing, to be reinstated. Others argued passionately against that.

Teachers, ordered by school district leaders not to speak to reporters, privately decried what they described as longtime inaction by administrators in the face of warnings about campus violence.

Santa Rosa school district leaders, scrambling to respond in the face of an outpouring of concern and withering criticism, held a “listening session” that drew an estimated 800 people who vented fear, sorrow and anger and called for change.

One student at the gathering, Jimena Suarez, spoke of the dreams her immigrant father held for her.

“It’s so sad. He came here to give me a better life, and I live in fear to go to school,” said Suarez, 18, a Santa Rosa High School senior.

As school district and police investigators seek to uncover the conflict and institutional failures that led to the killing of Jayden Pienta, 16, and the arrest of Daniel Pulido, 15, the path to the accountability and increased school safety that all are calling for is unclear.

What happens next? What steps will be taken? Who determines the response? Nothing seems certain right now.

“I’m very concerned and I want to see what’s going on and how I can help and make a difference,” said Anthony Lim, after the assembly. The Santa Rosa family physician attended the listening session even though his children are in private school.

“There’s a lot of blaming the school board, but I think it’s bigger than that,” Lim said. “It’s all of us.”

On Friday, nine days after the deadly altercation at his campus, Montgomery Principal Adam Paulson sent parents a message saying two students had been found with knives on them at school. Both students were sent home and “consequences for each student were applied per school and (school) board policy,” Paulson said.

He did not elaborate.

As the community reflected on the classroom tragedy, Press Democrat reporters reached out to students, parents, teachers, administrators, district leaders and others to discuss what needs to happen in the future to ensure campuses are safe.

Here’s what they had to say:

Parents

Libby Dalton and Jennie Harriman, co-presidents of the Montgomery Education Foundation, said students have made clear what they want and need to make their school safer. In an email to The Press Democrat, Dalton and Harriman outlined what they’re hearing from students, who are speaking in “strong” voices.

• More adults on campus for supervision, mental health support, solid safety protocols that include communication to staff, students and families.

• The district must address facility issues that pose a threat to students’ health, including mold, elevated carbon dioxide levels and mushrooms growing on the buildings.

“This is not the Montgomery High School our students deserve,” the foundation presidents said in the email. “We can do better. The school board has to do better.”

Dalton and Harrimann added that board members were elected to be leaders for education.

“If they aren’t ready to step up for our kids, maybe it’s time for leadership that will,” they said.

A Montgomery parent, who asked to remain anonymous for fear their child will be targeted at school, said officials need to address what has become a form of entertainment on social media: Students regularly upload videos of fights and other violence to platforms like Snapchat.

“There’s nothing private about these fights, all the students have access to Snapchat. They’ve been watching these fights all year long,” the parent said, speaking in Spanish. “My daughter would show them to me, videos of girls fighting, too. These videos were happening almost every week.”

She said she feels there is clearly a culture of tolerance for this sort of violence at Montgomery. The school’s administrators, she added, should have clear, enforceable rules banning such violence and policies for acting quickly to control behavior.

The parent said that she hasn’t received any communication from the school about what strategies are being launched to avoid the kind of violence that cost a student’s life last week.

“We parents are waiting for the school to share their strategies to keep this from happening again,” she said.

Students

Joey Bowser, a senior and student government member at Montgomery, said trustees need to push for state funding.

“Local control funding formulas, they're not adequate to sustain a legitimate education for this many schools,” Bowser said, adding more state funding is needed to support student’s needs, supervisor roles that pay a living wage, and mental health resources — “just creating a better environment for people to thrive.”

Andre Achacon, 17, the student body president of Santa Rosa High School, organized a team of about 30 student leaders across the county to participate in the school walkouts Wednesday. He also called on the board for leadership.

“Students are really looking to the board to take action, or at least make serious pledges, when it comes to student safety,” Achacon said.

“I think that it makes it difficult to know what needs to be done from the community perspective when we haven't fully gotten a response from the district board.”

Josephine Riviera, 17, a senior at Maria Carrillo, also said that she and other students are circulating a petition online with lists of demands for the trustees.

They call for increased non-police campus security, reformed evacuation and alarm protocols, clearer communication in the event of an emergency, mental health support for students and a student panel dedicated to addressing school violence.

So far, 50 people have signed it.

“We want to see funding,” Riviera said.

“We want to see meetings. We want to see the administration, as well as all the teachers who have been coming together, talking about this issue and how exactly they're going to protect students because, like it or not, we're kind of their constituents — we’re placed in their hands.”

A group of friends, all 17-year-old seniors at Maria Carrillo who have been involved in the walkout efforts, said they fear that once the current furor dies down, momentum will be lost.

“The school board meeting that we had on Wednesday was historic, but I think that we need to continue attending in order to see some sustained change or progress on school safety measures,” said Riya Ramakrishnan.

One of their biggest concerns is that once they graduate, the movement will die off, said Rebecca Almendra. She said she and others are trying to get younger students involved.

“Now that we're in this position, I think it would be useful to reach out to them a lot more and advertise how important it is to show underclassmen the importance of getting involved in the school activities and advocating for your community and using your voice,” Almendra said,

School officials

Stephanie Manieri, president of the Santa Rosa City Schools District Board, said the board’s immediate priority is making sure there are extra personnel on campuses so students feel safe returning to classrooms. .

“And looking forward, what we're going to continue doing is listening,” Manieri said, adding they plan to host more listening sessions like the one they held Tuesday, which drew a crowd of about 800 community members.

Manieri, Superintendent Anna Trunnell and leaders of other Sonoma County school districts also met with Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, Friday morning to discuss state funding.

“We really need to make sure that we have a steady stream of funds” to create systemic change and monetarily support the long-term changes students say they need, including increased counselors, supervisors and wellness centers, Manieri said.

The district’s current budget just won’t cut it, she said.

“While we're having conversations about what we need to do moving forward, we also need to have conversations about what we're going do as a community to heal from this really tragic event,” Manieri said.

Omar Medina, vice president of the school district board, said he has spent the past week listening and studying the feedback board members have received.

The community has emphatically called for more adult supervision on campus, but it’s not clear what that would look like, he said.

He would like to see additional restorative justice specialists at schools. That could help address what students have described as lengthy wait times to receive services, he said.

More counselors who can meet students’ needs on campus as well as refer them to outside services are needed, too, he said. He also called for family engagement facilitators who help monitor how students are doing at school and home and serve as a liaison among school administrators, parents and the community.

Medina noted the district has struggled with staffing shortages and filling vacancies, in part because of Sonoma County’s high cost of living, which is something the district must address to increase the number of resources on campus.

Two campus supervisor positions are currently listed on the district’s hiring board, he said.

The district implemented a $1,000 hiring bonus to attract staff, but it’s still a challenge to fill positions, he said. The board will need to consider additional measures to entice workers to apply, he said.

Beyond additional personnel, Medina said he’d like to see the district evaluate how it communicates with students and parents during emergencies.

Schools also need to better communicate to students what resources are available on campus, including a mobile application, STOPit, that lets students anonymously report bullying and other incidents, he said.

Medina said some of these changes could be addressed administratively while others likely would be discussed as part of the budget process.

“I’m very interested in seeing what we can do as fast as we can do it,” he said.

The sadness and anger expressed over the past week was justified, Medina said, and the board and the district need to rebuild community trust if efforts to improve school security and address broader issues are to be successful.

Board trustee Alegria De La Cruz said she would like to see more social-emotional support on campuses.

De La Cruz said the district must be thoughtful and inclusive in how it addresses safety concerns, and the solution may not look the same for all students.

“There’s a continuum between safety and security and what that looks like is different for different people based on their lived experiences,” she said.

Anna Trunnell, Santa Rosa City Schools Superintendent, said the most immediately apparent concrete action to ensure school safety is a move to increase the number of adults on all school campuses in the district.

That step, Trunnell said, has emerged from an ongoing investigation — which she called a “full systems audit” — of what led up to the deadly March 1 altercation at Montgomery High.

The audit’s focus so far, she said, has been “from the perspective of who is currently on our campuses and how do we navigate supervision … currently and what we’re planning to do differently. And we are also taking stock of how we monitor people coming on and off our campuses.”

Trunnell said: Assessing “the visibility and engagement between staff and students during the school day, during transition periods and when they’re in class, is definitely something we are doing now, and that will continue to be part of our process.”

Those additional adults will be people temporarily reassigned from other district positions, as well as lent to the district by the Sonoma County Office of Education and other community organizations including Raizes Collective and the Santa Rosa Violence Prevention Partnership.

They will be in place for the rest of the school year, she said.

Long term, Trunnell said, the aim is to hire more people to permanently staff campuses, but that will require wrestling with budget and personnel issues.

“It's a very intricate process because it involves looking at what our resources are and also there are (labor) negotiations involved,” she said. “So, it's not something that is for one person to decide.”

She said: “My goal would be that we would be able to make some of those decisions in preparation so that we have additional support in place by the fall.”

Additional staff members could well include more counselors, restorative justice specialists, therapists and the like.

But for now, the primary focus, Trunnell said, is “just more campus supervision” during passing periods and in class, “just general monitoring of the campus.”

Asked whether disciplinary actions such as suspending students might find greater use in the district — something teachers and parents in the past week have urged to both deter and punish errant behavior — Trunnell said it depends on the situation.

But, “we definitely want to continue down the path of providing our students supports and resources before we might consider certain levels of discipline.

“The main goal,” she said, “is to keep students in school.”

Teachers

John Cortopassi, a Santa Rosa High School history teacher for nearly 30 years, called for revisiting disciplinary policies — but in a measured fashion.

“We need to see the district and site administrators hold that small percentage of students that seem to be causing issues accountable. What I hear from the protests is that students do not feel safe,” he said. “That feeling is not because of their teachers, it is because of the actions of their peers and the lack of open and honest communication from the administration.”

Cortopassi added: “We always talk in education that it’s like a pendulum. The fear I have is we go from almost no discipline and no accountability and you go to the other extreme. I don't want us to go back to zero tolerance, because that didn’t make sense at all.”

Marlena Hirsch, who retired last year from a 27-year education career, the last seven as a Piner High School science teacher, said more and more intensive counseling is needed. She said the Grace program she taught in, for students who were failing school, had one part-time counselor for roughly 65 students.

Counselors need to be able to focus on reaching students early, when they first show signs of falling behind or becoming discouraged or disillusioned, she said, not after they’ve started experiencing more significant problems.

And, she said, meetings with students need to also include their parents, relevant community organizations and teachers — “their broader community.”

“It’s essential for the counselor to have a certain amount of hours so she can orchestrate all this,” Hirsch said.

A longtime teacher at Cesar Chavez Language Academy in Santa Rosa said she’s concerned about the safety of her students and has witnessed ongoing fights and conflict that go unaddressed.

Administrators “know about it and they keep saying we’re working on it, we’re working on it, and nothing happens,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity because the district has forbidden “unauthorized” staff from speaking to the news media.

She said more effective consequences for misbehavior are needed and that “addressing gang activity would be the No. 1 step.”

A Montgomery High teacher, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said three staffing changes would improve safety on campus: a therapist on campus that kids can see any time without needing to get a referral; more campus supervisors; and crisis intervention counselors.

Right now, she said, “we feel ignored.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay