A feeling of being safe is very important to a student's ability to focus on academic learning in the classroom. Obviously if a student's attention is constantly demanded by concern about being jumped by other students. they have to pay attention to the kids around them, not to the teacher or the classwork. So he or she is not going to do well in school. Plus they have the emotional context of the affective filter which puts up a barrier to learning, except what they are learning about the anticipated danger. The kids usually like the police officers and trust them and feel safe with them around. As a San Francisco Unified sub, I knew that the kids would act up until I called the school security--that's who they wanted to see. The security person comes to the door and tells them it's all right for me to be there, so then they settle down. I was very grateful for the backup and support of the police officers.
Jean Womack

Why should El Cerrito subsidize the SROs at Portola and ECHS? The majority of their students come from outside the city, as do an even larger majority of the troublemakers. In fact, judging from the police blotter, Richmond should pay El Cerrito for the disproportionate amount of the police budget directed toward Richmond residents visiting El Cerrito, on and off campus. Also, last year the WCCUSD board directed staff to come up with some "best practices" initiatives to reduce truancy. What happened to that? Truancy cost the district millions a year in ADA money, yet instead of plugging that hole they propose yet another parcel tax to make up the difference. I'll not vote for another tax until the parents of these no-shows are held to account.

Back a few years, when the WCCUSD hired a professional, outside REAL police professional to take on the problem of incompetent Local 1 manned school security, and make a recommendation as to it's future. He proposed turning policing over to local agencies. Local 1 used its political power to force the Board to turn down his proposal, and he quit in disgust. A few weeks later, on the first day of school, an El Cerrito resident student was shot in the neck right outside the entrance to the temporary campus. The then Principal, along with the Local 1 Keystone cops, refused to notify the El Cerrito Police. The exasperated mother of the injured student emailed a few of her fellow PTSA members, and I forwarded her email to the entire School Board, the El Cerrito City Council and the El Cerrito Police Chief. The El Cerrito Police have been on campus ever since.

What a sad sign of the times. The fact that a full time cop is needed on a school campus doesn't say much for type of students (and especially their parents) that are in school these days.

I remember that a SFUSD cop gave me the assignment of calling parents of kids who did not show up for school the first day. You know that is before Labor Day, not after Labor day. The cop said that children who were not in school before Labor Day were considered to be missing children. I could not recall him ever missing those days of school, but we never went anywhere. I sent him to these wonderful day camps and he even got scholarships up to Lawrence Hall of Science computer camps. I said, if you will just sit down for a half hour and fill this form out, it's worth $500. That's a thousand dollars an hour for a little bit of work. He could understand that. So he was glad to get a scholarship to go to West Point, though they took nearly all their paycheck back to buy uniforms, etc. Anyway, I was calling those San Francisco parents to beg them to bring their children to school. I thought I had the appropriate tone of voice and pathos going over the telephone after that cop got through talking to me about it.

Bottom line, the SRO's are very effective at their jobs. The climate change before and after their presence has been night and day. Serious crime used to be an issue on campus, but no longer. At ECHS, the number of fights through this entire year might have been seen in a single day prior to ECPD on campus. Can we maintain or improve school climate if the SRO's are no longer present? I think it depends on how we respond.

One summer I got a job teaching Great Books to some of the cutest fifth graders you will ever meet, in the San Francisco Sunset District. The principal said she fired the previous teacher because he had taken the kids out on the playground even though she told him not to. She said they didn't have enough security (police) to protect those kids on the playground in the summer, so she couldn't let them go out on the playground. One of the kids was the ringleader and of course he started in on me too, telling me that summer was a time for playing outside, not staying inside studying, which is what they were there for. He was also urging the boys to go into the girls restrooms and vice versa. So I told the kids, this kid is trying to get you into trouble and then when you do it, he comes to me and tells me about it so you will get in trouble. So I said, don't fall for it. The next day he had dropped out of summer school and the rest of the summer was peaceful. I don't like to lose any of them, but I like to get a paycheck too. In my mind I can hear that kids' dad telling him it's fun to go into the girls restroom. That kid winds up hanging out with Officer Elder. I think he is worth every dime they pay him.

Now that I think about it, I guess maybe I could have sat down with that little ringleader myself and had a talk with him, but I had not reached that level of school teaching yet. We had a curriculum to cover and I did not have time to teach and be a counselor too, I thought. The Great Books curriculum was completely new to me so I spent the rest of my time learning it, so I could teach it to the kids. The kids had to go out to the playground to go to the restrooms and then I had to get them back into the classroom. Usually subs do not call the police for help until the kids reach middle school age, though I am sure we would all like to have Arnold show up in our classroom. You just have to learn classroom management techniques. Sink or swim, as they say. One of the those little kids was so frightened that he had brought a large knife to school with him and the other kids tattled on him to me. So I sent him to the principal. He had to sit in the principal's office at lunch time, until I wondered why they didn't send him back right away as was the usual case with me. So I went looking for him and then she sent him back to class. By the end of the summer school, he seemed to be losing weight so I wrote the SFPD a letter about it after school was over, which was probably a stupid thing for me to do. Sometimes bigger kids take the little kids' lunches away from them and they might be afraid to complain to the school security officer. But I am not afraid anymore.

I would like to add my comments here. Again, with the safety? 10+ years ago I, and many hardworking parents, fought very hard to bring safety to our school campuses. As a lifelong resident of El Cerrito, I was appalled at the stories my then middle school child was bringing home, and didn’t believe her. So I took a week off from work to hang out and roam the halls…WOW!! Eye opener. The result was the volunteer safety parents with a lot of hard work and input from the ECPD, administrators, PTSA, and concerned citizens. Then at long last the SRO program. Long story short, if you do away with the SRO’s you are moving backward. If you are lax with your safety parents DON’T BE….We saw what happened with Portola when our guard was let down. You can look at your local and national educational institutions to see that violence is not just going to go away..Colleges are no better. I am an Adult school educator and have seen violence on our campus…Let’s work together for all students everywhere..and make it a positive, not a negative!
Michele Urnberg-Jawad

I was a student teacher at age 57, give or take a few years. After dropping out of the credential program to get another round of treatments for breast cancer, I had to beg San Francisco State to let me back into the program. They finally found an art teacher at Galileo High School who I suspected (years later) was in the juvenile justice system, because they never told me, as I went from school to school, which ones were the "bad" schools and which ones were the "bad" classes. This teacher told me to sit on that chair, next to the door and don't move and don't say anything, because it was going to take the kids a while to get used to me. They didn't like strangers. But I found out that I was not the only one who was rooted to her chair in that classroom. Those kids would not get up out of their seats without an act of Congress or an OK from that teacher, and neither would I. What else can I say?

Yet, at that same high school, there were more kids in the hallway, gatherered around the hall monitors who were sitting at many of the corners of the hallways, than there were in some classrooms. In that school year, one child was shot and killed. The kids put long rolls of white paper up on the walls of the school and the other kids wrote on it, with messages, names, pictures, whatever they had to say. They had a week of memorials outside in inner courtyard. I went out there because I thought that there should be some white people there too, showing some concern for the kids, not just black kids at those memorials. I did not want those kids to think the whole world was against them. I was pretty sure that the whole world was not against them, even though it feels that way, sometimes.

Thanks for letting me write about my experiences in the San Francisco public schools. I hope it has some relevance to El Cerrito. I know there were some people who did not want me to write about my experiences teaching in the public schools. I wonder where is the rich American literature we deserve? Why are we relegated to reading novels by British authors and watching movies about private British schools, when we could have authors of the quality of Frank McCourt (Teacher Man), or Belle Kaufman (Up the Down Staircase) regaling us with American experience. It's like, no one expects to climb to the level of Mark Twain, but please don't tell teachers to stop writing!

You can just erase my remarks. It's all right. I don't care. I just thought my experience could benefit someone else and give some insight as to why cops are needed on school campuses. You have people who put labels on other people and dump them into a category of people to be despised, but it's not that simple. I come from the school of thought that believes that people should not be condemned to a lifetime of being labeled with their crime, as if that was all there was to that person, instead of a being a person who was misguided and led into doing something harmful or destructive or bad for himself or others, and then was stopped from repeating it over and over again. Like, I take college classes that teach people how to rescue youth from a self-destructive lifestyle. And they don't do it by putting labels on the kids, but yes, they do use labels in that classroom too. However the guest speaker used labels but the regular teacher never does. So maybe that's why she's the regular teacher and not someone else, do you suppose, huh? Maybe that's why her students adore her and she has been teaching at that college for many years even though she teaches very very sensitive subjects--because she doesn't use labels.