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Parents and many community members were outraged when they saw a video on social media in January showing a Pleasanton Middle School student punching and stomping on the head of another student in front of the city library — many of whom spoke at Pleasanton school board and City Council meetings during public comments in those following weeks.
So when the council joined the Pleasanton Unified School District Board of Trustees at their district office meeting room for an annual joint meeting on April 20, district staff made sure to cover a wide range of topics to address community concerns about their children’s safety at school.
Other aspects of student safety were also covered as the Pleasanton Police Department presented the latest about the school resource officer program and the city’s traffic engineer shared an update on crossing guards and how the city is working to establish a criteria for possibly adding new crossing guard locations.
Student behavior
Ed Diolazo, deputy superintendent and assistant superintendent of student support services for PUSD, kicked off the evening with safety at the school site level and how the pandemic had affected students’ behavior because they didn’t have socialization skills.
He said that those who had support at home, the experience might have hindered their education, but for those who didn’t have that same support it was devastating to their educational and behavioral development — which can lead to negative behavior such as fighting at school.
“Kids need to socialize,” Diolazo said. “Part of being in school is learning how to learn. Especially for our youngest students, that concept about coming to school and figuring out how you fit in the world; when you’re not around other students that can definitely be impacted.”
“So when we think about behavior, especially for some of our students, they’ve never been on a campus,” he added.
And while he said that most of those young elementary students didn’t have much trouble acclimating to a regular campus, that wasn’t the case for a lot of students — specifically those who came from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds or students who might be experiencing some form of trauma.
“We know that sometimes social isolation can cause certain levels of trauma and we know that behavior actually is a response to trauma,” Diolazo said.
That’s why he said PUSD has been exploring different ways to teach these students so that they can begin to be more proactive in dealing with behavioral issues that can be caused by the student not being able to learn due to whatever trauma they might be going through.
He said the idea of restorative teaching practices and creating a space for students to feel comfortable talking to staff and teachers will be the solution to helping students rather than things like suspension. Although he did point out that when needed, school will still swiftly suspend students as consequences for serious actions.
“Restoring relationships, repairing harm — those are the things we’d rather do rather than just send a student home to be suspended,” Diolazo said.
He then went on to talk about the incident that happened outside of the library in January and the efforts from Pleasanton Middle School and district administration to restore a sense of safety at the school.
Diolazo said that apart from community town halls, safety surveys being conducted and a coalition being formed that got student and parent perspectives on the incident to help find ways where PUSD can do better in future incidents.
However, the most notable solution to address negative student behavior and specifically the incident at PMS was the “Pleasanton Library Pilot Project”.
Lia Bushong, city assistant director of library and recreation, told the council and school board that it’s mostly a recreational-based program that gives students a chance for activities and socialization. While the program is on a four-week pause because of library construction, the program is set to return as soon as the temporary closure ends on May 15.
PUSD Trustee Justin Brown confirmed with staff that the library program is mainly targeted for middle schoolers, but they still have fifth graders and some high school students as well.
Leslie Heller, PUSD director of student services, also provided the community with specific expulsion data from all the middle schools as well as suspension due to fighting in order to give more context surrounding the January incident.
She said that while district expulsion data has declined over the past five years, PMS now has the most fighting suspensions after the library incident occurred — she said before that it was Hart Middle School, which had 40 suspensions.
PUSD Trustee Kelly Mokashi said she was “floored” by the data across all the school sites and wanted to know more about how the district is supporting students going through the transition from elementary to middle school.
Heller said that is important to set behavioral expectations early on, which is where the district’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports multi-tiered system, which provides educators with systemic ways to ensure that students grow and succeed.
Back on the topic of the PMS incident, Vice Mayor Jack Balch asked about the time in between when students walk from the school to the library and had staff inform the public on how principals and administrators supervise students out in the streets and also have people supervising from library since the incident occurred.
Councilmember Valerie Arkin, who is a former PUSD trustee, also wanted to know more about social media use given how the students recording the PMS fight focused more on posting the incident rather than intervening.
Superintendent David Haglund said that while there aren’t any new policies regarding social media, certain policies have been updated.
Councilmember Julie Testa, who said that she and her kids saw a similar incident of the library fight when her children went to PMS, asked about more after-school activities for the rest of the schools.
Diolazo said that there are various after school programs for other schools and that a recently formed Panther Club at PMS will be made available to other middle schoolers and that the recreational program could be created for each of the other schools in the future.
Student safety
More presence from school resource officers, school security improvements and additional crossing guard locations were the other core points that were discussed during the April 20 joint meeting.
Trustee Brown brought up the point on SROs and how he wanted to see more of a presence from them at the middle schools to which police Lt. Erik Silacci said that while the department is facing staffing issues, the three SROs that are stationed at the high schools still make their rounds to the middle schools and have a strong presence at each of them.
He said the SROs actually get called from the middle schools a lot for consultation, which he emphasized was a key component in the relationship between the SRO program and how much they handle in terms of discipline along with school site administrators.
Balch also asked when the city should start considering adding more SROs — especially given the fact that more students could move into the district in the future to which PPD Chief David Swing said doesn’t know if the city needs to have those discussions just yet and that there really isn’t a solid metric to measure when a city would need a certain number of SROs.
Ahmad Sheikholeslami, PUSD assistant superintendent of business services, also touched on some concerns that were brought up by some parents who spoke at the meeting during public comments regarding adding more supervisors, fences around elementary schools and improving the overall safety of PUSD schools.
“School safety encompasses not only the tragic headlines we read about, but also the day to day campus life,” said Elizabeth Untermann, a PUSD mom of three. “Have improvements been made, sure. Are there still gaps in safety? Absolutely.”
Sophia Perlegos, who spoke alongside Untermann and has been working with her to advocate for more campus supervisors for elementary schools, said that not doing so is negligent.
While Sheikholeslami did not touch on bringing in more supervisors, he did provide updates from the $270 million Measure I1 bond that funded security improvements such as more fences, new state-of-the-art camera systems and a new check in process that requires schools to lock all doors after a certain time in the morning so that people have to forcefully go through main offices and go through a system that does background checks based using driver’s licenses.
As for new crossing guard locations, city traffic engineer Mike Tassano told everyone during his presentation that while the city staff have completed informal reviews around elementary schools and found that approximately 15-20 additional locations could meet the criteria for a crossing guard, it is still up in the air.
He said that the city had already received numerous requests for new crossing guards in 2019 but that there was no formalized criteria for adding crossing guards.
He said that staff initiated an evaluation of existing crossing guard locations to help guide the establishment of criteria for new crossing guard locations but that the 17 new guards that the city is looking at adding could raise the amount the city spends on the program from $400,000 to $800,000.
Tassano added that if they keep the 23 guards that the city currently has, then staff will look at the requests for new locations and if the location meets the newly developed criteria, they will evaluate relocating an existing crossing guard with the corresponding school site administration.
