How do violence numbers at Montgomery High compare with other local schools?

In the wake of Wednesday’s tragedy at Santa Rosa’s Montgomery High School, where a classroom fight between three students ended with a stabbing that left one teenager dead, students, staff, parents and journalists are trying to make sense of what happened.

They’re also grappling with what it says about the larger context of student safety and violence in schools.

As The Press Democrat reported Wednesday, the Santa Rosa Police Department received 97 calls for response from the school in the past 12 months.

The vast majority of these calls are for nonviolent issues — fireworks on campus, suspicious vehicles and burglary, for example. In the past year, seven of the reports were for battery, assault or some kind of fight on campus, according to Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Christopher Mahurin.

For comparison, during the same period, there were 96 calls from Elsie Allen High School, 104 from Piner High School, 142 from Maria Carrillo, 119 from Santa Rosa High School and nine from Ridgway. While there are some more serious assaults among the incidents reported, like with Montgomery High, most are less critical.

The police logs don’t necessarily give a full picture. Some schools deal with incidents on their own, and the removal of community resource officers from campus affected how many calls went directly to police.

Wednesday’s death stood apart.

“To my understanding, we’ve never had this significant of an incident on a school campus,” Mahurin said.

In general, fatalities on school grounds are relatively rare.

Schools have been especially struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic when both staff and students often feel stretched thin and unsupported.

Still, while there has been an increase in school shootings, and particularly mass shootings -- such as 2012’s Sandy Hook in Connecticut, Colorado’s Columbine in 1999 and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 in Florida -- school violence more broadly has dramatically declined over the past two decades by more than 50%. That’s according to Ron Avi Astor, a UCLA professor and expert in school violence and bullying.

“That doesn't feel any better,” Astor acknowledged. “Our norms are that this shouldn't happen at all. No child should be killed by going to school. It doesn't really help us to know that the numbers are smaller.”

Tracking and analyzing the data is really important, though, for understanding what interventions and policies work.

Resourcing schools with more help, counseling, school psychologists, restorative justice programs and more extracurricular and social opportunities for students has helped reduce day-to-day violence across California, Astor said.

He noted the impulse after serious school injuries or deaths is to “harden” facilities by adding metal detectors, law enforcement or see-through backpacks.

“There's not a lot of research that supports that's healthy for the vast majority of kids in the long run,” he said.

"That kind of more zero tolerance frames kids as the perpetrators,“ Astor added. "In the long-term, it really impacts school belonging-ness, attendance, graduation, college...”

What’s very lacking in the study of violence in schools is research on stabbings and knives in classrooms. Almost all the literature focuses on firearms.

“It's a concern because almost every child has access to a knife,” Astor said.

The little research that does exist, he told me, indicates that those students carrying knives is often in response to feeling unsafe or having been victimized themselves.

One source of critical information is the California Healthy Kids Survey, a confidential survey of California students’ feelings of safety, mental health and well-being at school.

Sonoma County’s 2017-2019 survey of middle and high school students found that almost 60% of ninth grade respondents said they felt safe at school.

However, 15% reported being afraid of being beat up by fellow students on school property in the last year, and 4% said they’d been threatened with a weapon.

Other questions pertain to mental health, feelings of connectedness and sense of support. Individual schools also have their own reports.

“That's kind of like the rumbling before the earthquake,” Astor told me.

“In Your Corner” is a column that puts watchdog reporting to work for the community. If you have a concern, a tip, or a hunch, you can reach “In Your Corner” Columnist Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or marisa.endicott@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @InYourCornerTPD and Facebook @InYourCornerTPD.