State grant brings Petaluma police officers to Casa Grande, Petaluma High

Petaluma officers Jon Antonio and Dan Miller thumbed through a stack of index cards Thursday morning, reading aloud questions submitted by the group of San Antonio High School students gathered around them.

The questions ranged from how much the patrolmen were paid to why they chose careers in law enforcement. Finally, nearing the end of the hourlong Q&A, Antonio pulled a card asking the men to describe the most intense call to which they’d ever responded.

Antonio recounted the chaotic scene of an Aug. 31, 2016, crash at the Petaluma River, in which a Rohnert Park woman crashed through an embankment near the Petaluma Village Premium Outlets and into the 6-foot-deep river. While she was able to climb out of the car, the woman’s two daughters, ages 7 and 9, did not survive. The students were quiet.

“I still wake up upset about it,” Antonio said of the incident. “I almost quit this job over that.”

This week, both officers started new assignments as school resource officers for the Petaluma Unified School District, reviving a program that has been ended twice in the past decade because of financial and staffing shortfalls.

They hope to strengthen relationships with the city’s youth through candid conversations like the one Thursday, Antonio said.

“The respect will be mutual,” Antonio said.

Their positions are secured for two years through a California Department of Justice grant program funded by the state’s tobacco sales tax. The school district was awarded the money in June.

The officers will focus most of their efforts on the district’s two largest schools, with Antonio handling Casa Grande High School and Miller working at the Petaluma High School campus.

The grant amount totaled $1,040,000, said Petaluma City Schools Assistant Superintendent Dave Rose, who applied for the funding on behalf of the district.

The program comes at a time when high-profile mass shootings have raised awareness of school violence nationwide, which was a consideration the Police Department made when it decided to restart the program, Petaluma Police Lt. Ron Klein said.

Petaluma police were alerted to a school shooting threat to Casa Grande in April 2017 but later found the threat was not credible. A year later, in March, nearly 2,000 students from the city’s schools walked out of school as part of a nationwide protest against gun violence.

“Our hopes are to continue this,” Klein said. “I don’t ever want to see the community of Petaluma without school resource officers again.”

Both men will be tasked with building relationships with students during their time in the schools and will take a role in the campus safety planning and emergency preparedness drills, Klein said. They will also educate the campus about risks associated with tobacco use.

The funding provides more stable footing for the school resource officer program, which was cut in 2008 when the department faced financial and staffing constraints, Klein said. Before that, the program ran consecutively since the late 1990s.

The program was scrapped again after four months in 2013, when another set of staffing shortages hit the Petaluma Police Department.

Today, the resurgence of the program will prompt shifts within the department, which again faces staffing shortages among sworn staff, Klein said.

Currently, 61 of the ?66 allotted sworn officer positions are filled, but that includes officers on leave because of work-?related injuries and those who are training alongside more experienced cops.

In response, the department plans to move a detective assigned to the Sonoma County Auto Theft Task Force and an officer working for the department’s Homeless Outreach Services team back to patrol until more hires are made, the Klein said.

Klein described Antonio and Miller as seasoned officers with previous experience working in schools and coaching local youth sports teams.

Miller worked as a school resource officer from 2001 to 2008, when the program was first cut. He also spent several years coaching local baseball teams, including Casa Grande’s varsity baseball team, Klein said.

Antonio worked a short stint, less than a year, as a school resource officer before the program was cut in 2008 and again in 2013, he said.

He led the Piner High School varsity football team from 2011 through the 2015 season. He served a two-month stint as the head coach for the St. Vincent High School’s football team before resigning.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@nashellytweets.