Pajaro Valley Unified school board renews school resource officer contracts

The Pajaro Valley Unified School District governing board renewed contracts this week with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office and the Watsonville Police Department to provide the district’s three high schools with officers. 

Several people spoke out in support, while others spoke out against renewing the contracts – reflecting a yearslong divide among community members as well as trustees. The majority of the seven-member board approved the contracts, with trustees Jessica Carrasco and Gabe Medina voting against. Trustee Joy Flynn was absent.

Trustee Misty Navarro said she voted to approve the contracts because her constituents support them, but she added that there’s room for improvement. 

“It is not perfect,” she said. “It is not ideal.” 

For years, many PVUSD community members have argued that school resource officers disproportionately target and have negative impacts on students of color and students with disabilities. Hearing these calls, the board canceled the school resource officer program in 2020 but renewed it after the fatal stabbing of a student at Aptos High School in 2021. Several people at the Wednesday board meeting, including Navarro, said they believed that had a school resource officer been present, that student would still be alive. 

PVUSD teachers including Chris Webb and Bobby Marchessault and Ashley Yoro Flowers, the president of the local chapter of the California School Employees Association, spoke out against renewing the contracts, along with some parents. They said the district should have instead kept its 13 mental health clinicians rather than laying them off this year, and they argued that if the district must keep the contracts, the law enforcement agencies should pay for officers. 

The school district is paying $166,500, or 75% of the annual cost of one full-time Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputy, to patrol at Aptos High School, and $152,053 for two part-time Watsonville PD officers to patrol at Watsonville and Pajaro Valley high schools. 

Parent Mads Realmuto, who in May announced his candidacy for the PVUSD board, told the district that Soquel High, part of the Santa Cruz City Schools District, pays the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office just 50% of the cost.

Navarro asked Superintendent Heather Contreras to renegotiate the contract in order to have PVUSD also pay for 50% of the SRO’s salary. She and other trustees also asked the district to pursue adding a mental health clinician to pair up with the law enforcement officers – which the district approved in 2021 until the mental health clinicians were laid off this past year. 

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