FREMONT — School district leaders in Fremont said they plan to spend more than $900,000 annually to ensure city police officers will continue to patrol the district’s six high school campuses as part of a longstanding program that has been disbanded, partially reinstated, and renegotiated in the last several months.
The Fremont Unified School District board voted 4-1 to fully reinstate and fund the School Resource Officer program early Thursday morning during a school board meeting that started Wednesday night.
Board member Dianne Jones dissented, saying she still thinks the program should be ended, based on a task force recommendation to do so last year. The task force, appointed by the board, showed Black and Latinx students were arrested at disproportionately high rates in recent years of the program, and that there is a lack of data about how police interact with students.
The board majority ultimately sided with some parents who have called and emailed the district, largely saying police officers on campus make them feel their kids are safe. Some parents also disagreed with and called into question the task force recommendations.
“Fremont is not Minneapolis and it is not Oakland. There is no police brutality going on here. There is no evidence of racial bias by the SRO,” Padma Gopalkrishnan, a parent, said during the meeting.
She said the task force was full of people with “anti-SRO positions,” and people who want to “abolish” the police.
“We respect the law, we trust law enforcement, and we want SROs to keep our children safe,” Gopalkrishnan said.
Whether to keep or scrap the program has stirred emotional and divisive debate since the fall, at times pitting some parents in the district who support the program against some students, alumni, and the teachers union, who have called for the program to be ended.
In a November 3-2 vote, the board decided to end the roughly two-decade old program, citing the issues raised in the 25-member task force report.
The report said the program didn’t have any measurable goals or outcomes, and allowed for too much deference to law enforcement in discipline matters.
The previous board also voted to accept recommendations from the task force to improve mental health support for students, expand restorative practices and to work up a new school safety plan, though it appears none of those recommendations were since put into action.
After the election, two newly seated board members, Vivek Prasad and Yajing Zhang, who both said they supported the program, helped swing the board majority in a vote to bring the program back earlier this year.
Though the board cut nearly $9 million to balance its budget in February, it allocated $442,000 to keep a partial police on campus program alive when kids eventually returned to campus.
At this week’s meeting, the board decided to bring back the full program of six officers and one sergeant, which will cost the district about $913,000 this coming school year. It’s unclear from where the additional funding for the school district side of the program will come. A district spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The most recent version of the program was recently estimated by the city and district to cost nearly $2.5 million, with the district picking up about $770,000 and the city picking up the balance. However, a total project cost for the program this coming school year was not available Thursday.
Geneva Bosques, a spokesperson for the police department, said Thursday afternoon in an email the funding would be “50/50,” with the city also picking up some overtime “for events and activities like sporting events and dances,” but couldn’t provide an exact cost to the city.
Some parents who spoke during the meeting in support of the program highlighted months of attacks on Asian people across the nation, including a recent sexual assault on a woman in Fremont’s Irvington district, saying many students in the district are Asian, and they fear for their safety at school.
One parent, Jennifer Zhuoma, brought up the tragic shooting of a party bus in Oakland earlier this week that killed two teenagers and injured several others.
“Do you want that to happen in Fremont?,” Zhuoma asked.
Another parent, Bill Wong, raised concerns relating to recent news of a Fremont teacher who was arrested in connection with a sexual assaulting of a student.
“Fremont Unified School District has teachers having sex with students recently. Molesting students. Possessing child pornography. Police officers are the heroes of our community, we want them on our campuses,” Wong said.
Jones pushed back, saying that “hate-driven” crimes against Asian people, and general crimes in the community are of serious concern, but questioned whether police on campuses would be the solution.
She instead suggested more mental health support, anti-racist and culturally sensitive training, diverse curriculums, and restorative practices could help address those issues, similar to the task force recommendations.
“For $913,000 dollars, we could have seven permanent, full-time psychologists,” she said.
Megha Govindu, a current student at American High School, said the police program is “reactive” and she instead wants the funding put toward mental health supports.
Board President Larry Sweeney said he supports the program, noting that all six high school principals support it, too.
“We have a lot of problems with the criminal justice system. We have a lot of problems with the police. But what we can’t do is sacrifice or minimize the safety of our students on campuses,” he said.
Sweeney said police officers on campus stop kids from “getting into the system” by “giving them a second chance” when they are in trouble.
“We’re protecting kids,” he said.
The district said the city and the district will negotiate new program terms, and will draft a program handbook that will “address goals, roles and responsibilities, general expectations and on-campus enforcement actions.”
The district staff also recommended that “regular reports” be provided to the board about the program, and that “additional data points and data sources for measuring program objectives and program impact” should be established.
The new agreement with the city and the handbook will be brought to the board for review and approval in June, staff reports said.
