Coachella Valley Unified board finds little consensus on safety plan during 2-hour meeting

Coachella Valley Unified school board members debated whether they could do more to ensure student safety during a specially scheduled, two-hour meeting Thursday night led by a professional facilitator to weigh school security.

However, they seemed not to arrive at a consensus on any strategy except they seem to believe it’s time to remove temporary fencing and stop mandatory backpack checks at Coachella Valley High. The district has not announced whether it will end those measures.

In fact, several board members seemed content with the district’s security status quo in spite of over a dozen threats at school sites in recent months that required a response from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, plus walkouts from students at Coachella Valley and Desert Mirage high schools protesting what they say are inadequate security measures.

“I believe security is doing an amazing job,” said Trustee Jesus Gonzalez.

Current measures that were supposed to be reviewed on Thursday's agenda but in some cases were not due to time constraints and off-topic conversations include:

• Campus cameras

• Campus security assistants

• Canine detection services

• Door lock guidelines

• Cooperation with local law enforcement

• School threat assessment teams

Frustrated with the apparent lack of progress, the Coachella Valley Teachers Association issued a statement on Facebook blasting the board.

“There are no words for the embarrassment that is the CVUSD School Board,” the post begins.  “They want growth mindsets in their employees and the students, but several of them cannot acknowledge that the times we are living in now are not the same as the times they attended school here. They cannot get off their personal agendas and personal opinions in order to represent their constituents. They cannot acknowledge that we have a safety problem needing to be addressed. Just slinging insults and laughing.”

With no action items presented or votes cast Thursday, it is hard to tell whether a majority of the board supports making changes to existing safety measures — such as adding more security cameras or more campus security assistants — or how that might look at different school sites.

One trustee, Trinidad Arredondo, reiterated his preference at several prior board meetings to add dedicated sheriff's deputies to secondary campuses and install metal detectors at the entrance of Coachella Valley High, at least.

But Gonzalez and Trustee Joey Acuña again reiterated their opposition to those ideas.

It appears based on comments throughout the meeting that the majority of the board agrees with Gonzalez and Acuña. But with the two of them speaking far more than anyone else and frequently interrupting the facilitator, it became hard to gauge precisely where the seven-member board stands on specifics.

The entire board agrees that the district should stick to its restorative justice model meant to include social services as part of a broader vision for school security, but exactly how that should be implemented beyond an outline laid out by Superintendent Luis Valentino in late March remains unclear. And whether law enforcement officers stationed at schools fit into that plan still remains unclear.

The entire board also worries that backpack checks at CVHS that began in March are too time-consuming and have caused students to run late to class in the lead-up to state and AP testing.

District security director Gus Paiz added that he believes the backpack checks are no longer working.

"It's not effective anymore,” Paiz said. “If they bring items on their person, their person isn’t being checked.”

But Superintendent Luis Valentino pushed back against Paiz. He said data show that far fewer weapons have been brought to CVHS and fewer incidents reported since the checks began in March. He did not present the data to the board on Thursday, and Paiz said he hadn't seen the data.

The complexities of school security are immense, especially in CVUSD.

On the one hand, board members cited that their district has many unique security characteristics that require nuanced security considerations: older facilities, low parent engagement, concerns about law enforcement due to immigration status and a lack of trust in Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco his prior membership in the Oath Keepers, a right-wing anti-government militia.

“Does that type of mindset worry about the little brown faces that come to school in our school district? Probably not,” Gonzalez said.

On the other hand, Gonzalez said Thursday’s meeting was only a reaction to a national phenomenon, that being the U.S.’s unique problem with frequent mass shooting. He and Acuña warned against having an "overreaction" to calls for more security measures by an outspoken group of community members.

The facilitator, Reyna Hohagen from Los Angeles, tried to keep the conversation germane to actions the board could control locally — such as, perhaps, adding female security assistants or analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of having security cameras.

She tried to lead the board through an exercise about how their values relate to their policymaking.

But the board often eschewed that deeper conversation and talked over one another.

“That’s such an abstract (idea), we would be here for 47 hours talking about what safety is,” Gonzalez said.

He and Acuña acknowledged many students and staff feel unsafe at school, but tried to drive a distinction between the perception of safety and actually being safe. As The Desert Sun reported in March in an article about CVUSD’s security dilemma, nationwide research suggests that armed law enforcement officers at schools improve perceptions of safety, but whether they actually make schools safer overall is widely debated and the subject of many academic studies.

The teacher’s union took offense to one of Gonzalez’s analogies about perceived threats: “I can believe there's a green dragon in my house every day, and if I believe it, it's real,” he said.

“Please share that (comment) with the staff and students who are afraid of the weapons being brought on campus,” the Coachella Valley Teachers Association posted, suggesting Gonzalez's comment was tantamount to saying, “The people bringing them and the weapons aren’t the problem. It’s the people who are afraid of the weapons.”

Thursday’s conversation largely went in circles and often spiraled back to one of two prevailing ideas: Some of the board thinks the status quo is working, and at least one member, Arredondo, wants to add law enforcement officers at secondary schools. There was little discussion of the nuances in between.

What happens next is unclear. The board meets again next Thursday for a regular meeting.

Maybe they will provide direction for Valentino’s outline of a broad security plan that considers physical, social and emotional safety. Maybe they will continue to agree to disagree.

Jonathan Horwitz covers education for The Desert Sun. Reach him at jonathan.horwitz@desertsun.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Coachella Valley Unified board reaches no consensus on safety plan