SRJC park ranger academy, one of seven nationally, put on hold

A groundbreaking Santa Rosa Junior College program that has trained rangers at city, county and national parks across the country for more than four decades is in jeopardy after the spring session was canceled because of declining enrollment and anticipated tighter budgets.

Longtime staff worry the yearlong hiatus will lead to a permanent end to the Park Ranger Academy, a flagship program founded in 1978 that pairs law enforcement training with park ranger-specific education over about 18 weeks, though school officials said they have not yet decided the fate of the academy.

The program, one of only seven nationwide, was first designed to prepare seasonal employees of National Park Service for the start of their careers but has since attracted students from city and county parks departments in other parts of California.

Faculty and agencies that train new employees through the program, which has 3,500 graduates since its inception, laud it for being the best of its kind, saying it has drawn students who skip past other, closer schools that also provide the specialized ranger training.

The academy is also a training ground for Sonoma County Regional Parks, where nearly every one of the department's 22 rangers has gone through the program, said Bert Whitaker, the agency's director.

“It started here and it's been emulated across the country,” said Scott Dunn, a part-time faculty member and alumni of the academy. “They've trimmed it down to only seven training centers across the country that can teach the program, and we're also known as being the best one.”

No nearby alternative

Feeder agencies in Northern California described a desperate need for the courses, which pair law enforcement training with park ranger- specific education. Today, six other campuses outside of California meet the requirements to run similar academies, which are overseen by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security that serves as the training body of federal law enforcement agencies. Though the program does not meet the requirement to train California State Park rangers, past graduates have gone to work for state park ranger programs in Washington and Wyoming, Dunn said.

“There is no other (nearby) ranger academy and we place a high value on that ranger culture and the professional model that they have in Santa Rosa,” said Matt Anderson, the chief ranger for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, which sponsors new hires through the academy and manages parks in Santa Clara, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties.

Rohnert Park-raised Beth Wyatt, who's worked as a park ranger for Sonoma County Regional Parks since 2008, said camping excursions to the region's redwood forests and high school field trips to Crane Creek Regional Park were a source of inspiration when she began searching for a new career.

Wyatt graduated from Sonoma State University with an art degree in 2003 but soon realized job prospects were not as lucrative as she had once imagined, she said. So she returned to school, enrolling in natural resource courses at Santa Rosa Junior College. Her studies helped land her current post, and came with paid enrollment at the Santa Rosa Junior College's Park Ranger Academy. Her fellow classmates included seasonal national park rangers from across the country and employees of city and county ranger programs through out the state.

“Really getting to know people from different areas was great,” Wyatt said of the program. “We had to depend on each other to get through the academy.”

Federal woes

But the program's federal requirements make it costly to run at a time of declining enrollment, which the college anticipates will translate to smaller budgets in future years, Santa Rosa Junior College President Frank Chong said.

A waiver initially approved by the California Community College's Chancellor's Office in April 2018, which allowed the school to use pre-October 2017 enrollment figures to calculate how much state funding it would receive, was extended and will expire in 2022, said Erin Bricker, a campus spokeswoman.

“We're trying to constantly see what the local demand is versus what we can afford,” Chong said. “It's unfortunate, but we can't be everything to everybody. We have difficult choices to make at this time.”

The program, which hosts several students from outside Sonoma County and California, met less than 60% of the 45-seat capacity during the fall 2019 semester, 80% the year before and 40% in fall 2017, the college said.

A single ranger academy costs the college about $248,000 to run, and the school recovers only about $129,000, or just over half of what it spends, Bricker said.

In-state students pay $3,400 to attend the ranger academy, while students from outside of California pay upward of $9,000, the college said.

Two other programs, a modular law enforcement academy the campus said had low enrollment and a two-year licensed vocational nursing program that the college hopes to compress into one year, were also put on hiatus last fall, Bricker said. The 2019-2020 budget called for $1 million in cuts to classes, and the trimming of an additional $6.5 million to other areas.

Challenge for parks

The hiatus of the ranger program has created an immediate challenge for regional parks departments that rely on the academy to train new hires and recruit graduates who have competed in the program on their own. That was true at Santa Clara County Parks, which had to divert training for a crop of new hires to a modular police academy when they learned the Santa Rosa academy would not hold classes in the spring, said Aniko Millan, a park ranger supervisor at the Santa Clara agency.

“But it doesn't have all the elements we need,” Millan said, explaining the police academy won't cover fish and game laws, natural resource management and other topics central to the work of park rangers. The agency will need to piece together supplemental training not covered by the police academy and has ceased recruitment efforts for the time being until leaders can figure out a long-term strategy to train new hires, she added.

“The long-term effect of not having a park ranger academy is having to utilize a police academy, which is going to ingrain in these new folks that (city police) mentality and philosophy,” Millan said. “It's missing the park ranger element.”

Whitaker, the director of Sonoma County Regional Parks, said there was no immediate effect on his department because the agency is not currently recruiting. But when the time comes to make more hires, the agency will need to either turn to the Santa Rosa Junior College in hopes of it restarting the academy, or start looking at the possibility of developing its own training program, Whitaker said.

“We understand the junior college needs to run a business model and pay for what they can,” Whitaker said. “There's definitely an ongoing need that we have that won't go away, so we look forward to partnering with (the school) on that.”

Dunn, the part-time faculty member, hopes to meet with local stakeholders to draft a plan for what to do next, whether that means asking for congressional help or recurring federal aid that would help sustain the academy in the long run.

The local stakeholder agencies also expressed an interest in looking at ways to modify the program to make it more affordable and tailor it more closely to the needs of their agencies. Under Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers requirements, the program must maintain a specific student-to-instructor ratio and make equipment updates as required by the federal body, which can make the academy costly to run, Dunn said.

“We'll do everything we can,” Chong said of the college's review of the academy, a process that could take up to nine months before a decision is made. “If we can get additional support from those agencies and the state, then we would consider bringing it back.”