Santa Rosa City Schools wants officers back on campus but faces funding issues

CBS News

8 hours ago

With students returning to school in just a couple of weeks, some in Santa Rosa may be expecting to see the return of school resource officers to their campuses.
It's been five years since Santa Rosa Schools got rid of their on-campus officers, but then, a series of violent events, including one death, caused the district to have a change of heart.
Now, even though there appears to be the will to bring the officers back, financially speaking, there doesn't seem to be a way to do it.
When students return to Montgomery High, it may feel like business as usual when it comes to safety. But in her 'welcome back' message to the public, Superintendent Lisa August delivered the good news.
"In partnership with the city of Santa Rosa," she said, "we're grateful for the recent unanimous vote by the City Council, supporting a new memorandum of understanding to bring School Resource Officers back to our campuses."
But what's missing from that understanding was any way to pay for it. The program was supposed to train five school resource officers, or SROs, to be assigned to the city's high schools.
It came after violent incidents in the schools culminated with the stabbing death of 16-year-old Jayden Pienta at Montgomery High. Heather Gruenbaum is a district parent and member of a group called the Safe Campus Alliance, which was formed after Jayden's killing to push for SROs in the schools.
"This was a program that was in place since 1996," said Gruenbaum. "It had been a long-term, successful program. We hadn't had as much violence. The violence since 2020, since the kids came back to school in 2021, has just skyrocketed in our school district. And that's not OK."
The SRO program ended in 2020 when some school board members objected to having law enforcement of any kind on campus for social equity reasons.
"I think the district finally had a situation where their board was prioritizing a more broad-range view, rather than an activist situation," said Gruenbaum, about the change of position. "The school district needs to advocate for the ENTIRE student body, the maximum amount of people that it's going to be helping."
But the district has such a budget problem now that it is going to start sending 7th and 8th graders to the high schools. At the same time, the city says it also has a huge deficit and can't afford to pay the estimated annual $1.7 million for officers for the schools.
"In this last budget cycle, we experienced more than $3 million in cuts of our own," said Sgt Patricia Seffens, SRPD's public information officer. "And that's before we even had this program in place. We lost 15 staff positions due to this budget cut."
And Seffens said it may be a while until the police department can help supply the schools with SROs.
"We're looking at, you know, five years or longer before all of that gets resolved," she said.
"It is really disheartening to hear that, for five years? That's not right," said Gruenbaum. "We need to move this forward. We need to make sure that this is a priority. Why? Just why? It's not really that much money. I think that they can handle this."
In June, overall, the city of Santa Rosa approved more than $11 million in cuts as part of the 2025-26 budget. They still reportedly face a long-term deficit of $45 million. And they are ineligible to apply for federal grants because of the city's policy to not cooperate with ICE. But Gruenbaum says other, smaller communities in the county seem to be able to afford an SRO program and she feels that the money would be there if the district hadn't ended the program back in 2020. As a result, it's now being viewed as a new expense that neither the city or the schools can afford.
"What does it take?" she said. "We've already had a horrible death in our district. What else is it going to take?"