Do Schools Face a Safety Problem or a Perception Problem?

Note: This is the third and final part in a series about enrollment at Rosemont High School and Albert Einstein Middle School. and .

One of the first things did this fall was spend less money on campus safety.

To Garrett Kirkland, it was plainly obvious that the school’s campus monitors were working way more than they needed to be.

“I started walking around the first day and–tell me where these hooligans are,” Kirkland said, adding that they now work fewer hours.

Just like many parents in the Rosemont area, he’d heard before he arrived at the campus that its students were rough and violent, and that safety was a big problem there. He said that doesn’t mesh with what he saw.

“The kids here are cared for,” Kirkland said.

because and are perceived to be unsafe. The Sacramento City Unified School District’s period ends this week, and .

Administrators deny Rosemont High and Einstein are any less safe than others in the district, and say people who feel they’re especially violent are focusing on second-hand information.

Taya Tarango Mello, a Rosemont resident and parent of a student, said several of her daughter’s former teachers advised her against Rosemont High School.

Mello said in an email that she “talked to several teachers and they told me that if I sent Kelsey to RHS it would be the worst thing I could do not only due to the lack of security (and) safety but the other aspects (like) teachers (and) administrative (issues).”

Rosemont High School Principal Leise Martinez said she encourages parents who have doubts about the school’s safety to come tour the Kiefer Boulevard campus.

“The best way to combat that (belief that the school is unsafe) is not believe what people say but just come and see for yourself,” Martinez said, adding that the school has a polite and respectful “community college atmosphere.”

According to suspension data from the district, Rosemont and Einstein are far from the most violent schools–but they aren’t the most tranquil, either.

During the 2010-11 school year, Einstein had the second most suspensions at any Sacramento City Unified School District middle school with 172, while Rosemont had the third-fewest among comprehensive high schools with 222. But compare those numbers with the enrollment of each school and Einstein becomes No. 6 out of the district’s nine middle schools in terms of the fewest suspensions, while Rosemont had the third fewest out of six comprehensive high schools (scroll down to see the full data).

Among the district’s comprehensive high schools, only John F. Kennedy and West Campus had fewer suspensions-per-student than Rosemont.

But not everything shows up in the statistics.

Kirkland said at Einstein, one of the biggest challenges is getting students to report bullying. He said the school has taken , but it’s still going to be present–just like it would be on any other campus.

“Whatever you're going to say about a school you can say about any school,” he said. “The best thing we can do is convince the kids it's a safe place to talk to us about the situation.”

Christina Pritchett, an occasional contributor to this site and the PTA president for both Einstein and Rosemont, said her daughter had troubles with bullying at the middle school level–but it was easy to resolve.

“Going into the elementary school and trying to get them to deal with the bullying problem was a lot more difficult than going into Albert Einstein and having them deal with it,” she said.

Pritchett said she’d heard the same rumblings from other parents about safety at Einstein and Rosemont before sending her kids there, but she said she hasn’t seen anything to make her question her decision.

“I feel 100 percent that my children are safe at either school–just from experience,” she said.

Rosemont High School Assistant Principal Nathan McGill said he’s been at that school for seven years, and it’s more peaceful than he’s ever seen it.

“I don’t think the school has ever been as safe as it is now,” McGill said. “There have been maybe four or five fights this year–that’s just not that many fights.”

He said the school has stepped up its efforts to intervene before a problem escalates to violence. McGill said he, a counselor and the school’s other assistant principal often meet with students to mediate.

He agreed with the other officials, saying second-hand information about the school has spread throughout the area. He recalled a recent parent visit, where a mother spent some time in the halls during passing periods.

“She said she was surprised because what she saw was nowhere near what she had been hearing,” McGill said.

--

Note: This is the third and final part in a series about enrollment at Rosemont High School and Albert Einstein Middle School. and .

-- 

2010-11 suspension data