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Maria Carrillo High School journalists cover protests, campus gun scares

Apr 11, 2023

Maria Carrillo High School journalists cover protests, campus gun scares

Adults might imagine the work of a high school journalist as relatively frivolous, with time spent covering school dances, clubs and gossip.

However, today’s students aren’t so privileged.

This year, the staff of The Puma Prensa, the campus newspaper of Santa Rosa’s Maria Carrillo High School, have been documenting a particularly challenging school year, defined by a series of campus scares and an uptick in behavioral issues among students struggling in under-staffed schools.

By the time a 15-year-old Montgomery High School student fatally stabbed a 16-year-old in a classroom at the Santa Rosa school on March 1, The Puma Prensa’s staff was already accustomed to reporting on troubling events.

On Feb. 15, 13 police cars and two motorcycles arrived at Maria Carillo during lunch without immediate explanation. While rumors began to circulate, police and school staff told students to return to class, the Puma Prensa’s web editor Sophia Hughes reported.

Students and parents were later informed that officers were responding to a call alleging a campus shooting was taking place. Thankfully, the call turned out to be a hoax.

A week later, on Feb. 24, classes were disrupted again due to a small on-campus fire. The day of the March 1 stabbing at Montgomery, Maria Carillo students were evacuated from class again after a fire alarm was pulled. The same morning, in an apparently unrelated incident, police arrested a student after receiving reports they had a gun. Although the student was not carrying the weapon at the time of the arrest, police later discovered a firearm discarded in a storm drain off-campus, according to The Puma Prensa.

Since the stabbing at Montgomery, the Maria Carillo journalists have chronicled countywide student protests in print and online. They also launched a new podcast, The Pawd, and, last week, published a documentary edited by staff writer Kevin Wei and filmed by staffers. The film, titled We Want Change, is a 50-minute collage of brief interviews with dozens of students and a few teachers and community members during school walkouts and public meetings, capturing opinions about the whirlwind of events in March.

Needless to say, the hard-working student journalists have plenty to say. In an interview last week, four staffers shared a wide range of stories from the front lines, offering an inside perspective on campus life which wasn’t always captured in the recent flurry of news coverage.

COVID Disruptions

To hear the Puma Prensa’s staff tell it, school life these days is colored by the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, in ways often unacknowledged or unappreciated by the outside world. Many students are struggling to reacclimate to in-person classes after spending several formative years at home.

Rosemary Cromwell, one of the paper’s editors, said, “Students went from interacting with nobody, or being stuck on a computer to [interacting with] all these people. And I think we’re seeing that a lot of people just broke. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t make that jump.”

“We’ve had problems at school just with basic things, like people [not] throwing away their trash. I’ve heard several teachers who have said, ‘We’ve never had underclassmen act this way,’” said Dana Borunda, a staff writer. “It’s not just exclusive to underclassmen, obviously, but [it’s visible] in how students are reacting to administration or to basic rules just because we’ve been in quarantine.”

Hughes, the web editor, called the transition back to in-person classes “epically brutal.” After being “thrown back into classrooms,” many students are having trouble readjusting to basic etiquette. “They were so used to being able to freely say whatever came into their head on the internet. But, when you go and say that in real life, it’s like, ‘Oh, that doesn’t work out as well,’” Hughes said.

Understaffing

Another factor contributing to behavioral problems may be a lack of adequate attention, the Puma Prensa staffers noted. The Santa Rosa City Schools’ hiring page currently lists 120 open positions, including a few campus supervisor positions. Those employees are tasked with keeping the peace on campus. But, because they are paid $17.40 per hour, the job is unappealing.

“We had a campus supervisor fully hired, and then he figured out exactly how much his pay rate was going to be, and he had to leave because he needed at least $21 an hour,” Cromwell said, comparing campus supervisors’ wages to what she makes “handing out free samples at Costco.”

Hughes said that the many problems stem from a “chain reaction” in which underfunding leads to understaffing, which leads to fights and other problems.

“People are angry because schools don’t have the capacity or the resources to help these children. We’re the ones who need attention the most, especially coming after this pandemic, and we haven’t been supported as we should, with access to counselors, therapists or appropriate class sizes,” Borunda added. “Class size is a huge factor in how much attention a student gets from their teacher… If we don’t get proper education, proper attention, kids feel cheated. Kids feel disappointed, and then the kids can get angry.”

Finding Solutions

Over a month after the stabbing death of the Montgomery High School student, debate about possible solutions continues.

One idea frequently mentioned by adult speakers at recent school board meetings is to bring police back to campus. For several decades, the Santa Rosa Police Department had an agreement with the Santa Rosa City Schools district to provide several officers acting as school resource officers (SROs) to several Santa Rosa campuses. However, in 2020, the district decided not to renew the agreement, based in part on concern over nationwide studies which show that SROs tend to disproportionately punish students of color.

“The adults often seem to be like, ‘security, lock it down, tighten it up,’” Cromwell said. “As for the kids, we want protection, we want more school staff, including campus supervisors, and we just want to know what’s going on.”

Wei, who edited the paper’s documentary, said, “The perspective that we shouldn’t bring SROs back is largely shared by students who think that having SROs on campus and metal detectors and all these kinds of things would be really restricting. It would bring down the mood of the campus in so many ways. It would make campus seem almost apocalyptic.”

“As a student of color, I just think that not everyone feels comfortable with police around, and not everyone’s going to be treated the same way when police are around. That’s just the reality, and to ignore that is just lying to yourself. If some students don’t feel that way, if they feel safer with police around, that’s valid to their own experience, but not taking into account the perspective of students of color is lacking empathy,” Borunda added.

Find ‘The Puma Prensa’ online at www.thepumaprensa.org.

Petaluma Copperfield’s Books workers launch union effort

Will Carruthers

Apr 4, 2023

Petaluma Copperfield’s Books workers launch union effort

Joining a nationwide rise in labor action, workers at Petaluma’s beloved Copperfield’s Books store are attempting to unionize.

On Saturday, March 11, members of the Copperfield’s Books Petaluma Union gathered under the downtown store’s awning to announce the campaign to a few dozen supporters.

A series of speakers highlighted their main concerns, including low wages, minimal paid time off, inadequate healthcare benefits and a lack of clarity about how workers should respond when customers are racist, homophobic or transphobic to employees. Union members stressed that they want to help preserve Copperfield’s as a community resource.

“I love Copperfield’s. My coworkers love Copperfield’s. We just want them to love us back,” one worker said to the crowd.

Robert Glover, a seven-year Copperfield’s employee, who introduced the idea of joining the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to his colleagues, hopes that unionizing will help the store retain experienced employees with knowledge of customers’ interests and preferences.

“One of the big reasons for unionizing for me was creating a stable environment. I had seen so many good people with decades of industry knowledge leave Copperfield’s because they could no longer afford to work there, because the pay was too low for the area,” Glover said.

Currently most workers are paid the minimum wage, $17.06 per hour in Petaluma, Glover said.

A full-time worker at that rate would make $34,120 a year, qualifying them for low-income, subsidized housing.

Even employees with decades of experience are paid only slightly more. Ellen Skagerberg, a 32-year employee, said she is paid $18 per hour. Ultimately, the lack of meaningful raises may have contributed to solidarity among workers.

“People who were there for six weeks, six months or six years, we’re all making minimum wage, and the six-year people were training the six-week people,” Skagerberg said.

Glover said that the union has support from almost all of the 21 part- and full-time employees at the Petaluma store. The union is not currently interested in organizing any of Copperfield’s eight other stores spread through Sonoma, Marin and Napa counties, according to Glover.

Three days before the public event, two workers from the Petaluma store delivered a letter to management at Copperfield’s headquarters in Sebastopol, requesting that the company voluntarily recognize the union. The company’s owners have declined to do so.

In an emailed response to questions last week, Cooperfield’s co-owner, Paul Jaffe, stated that a formal election with the National Labor Relations Board will give “everyone time to get more clarity on the issue and then have an election where everyone can feel safe in expressing their choice… under no duress or micro aggression.” Since the union announced its campaign, the company has begun a series of conversations with workers at multiple locations, including the Petaluma store, according to Jaffe.

Jaffe acknowledged many of the union’s concerns, but argued the company is constrained in what it can do.

“I do agree the issue of wages that haven’t kept up with rising costs is one that needs to be addressed, not only for Copperfield’s Books, but for most businesses these days,” Jaffe stated.

“There are longer term employees that have not had their wages raised proportionally, and I believe this to be one of the main issues for some of the staff in Petaluma and Copperfield’s Books as a company. I agree with them and do feel that ownership at Copperfield’s could have done a better job of addressing their needs. But at the same time, we are a unique small business with some of the smallest margins of any business, that also has to compete directly with the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and we have limits to the amount of raises we can give to all our people,” he continued.

Jaffe added that Copperfield’s has been family-run for 42 years and claimed that management has always been open to listening to concerns, even if they can’t always fix the issues raised immediately. Jaffe expressed regret that none of the “disaffected employees at the Petaluma store” reached out with their concerns before launching their union campaign so that some “misconceptions could have been discussed and perhaps cleared.”

Citing the stresses that the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation have caused over the past few years, Jaffe concluded “this is not an excuse, and we can always try and do better, but the ownership of Copperfield’s feels that the timing of this union effort is not the best or most efficient way for our business to operate….but we will leave that decision to the employees and honor the outcome.”

Union Movement

Copperfield’s workers are not alone in organizing. In California, the list of recently-unionized stores includes Moe’s Books in Berkeley, Bookshop Santa Cruz and Book Soup in Los Angeles. Workers at a few other stores, including Powell’s Books in Portland, OR, and Green Apple Books in San Francisco, have been unionized for decades.

In an interview, Glover said that workers had informally discussed unionizing for years, but working conditions during the pandemic and learning about the IWW’s Moe’s Books union effort ultimately inspired the campaign.

Coppycat poster - Copperfield's Books Petaluma Union — The union’s mascot, Coppycat, is a callback to the IWW’s black mascot, Sabocat. Photo courtesy of Copperfield’s Books Petaluma Union.

“The people I made contact with at the IWW were also book people, so they knew what we were going through and they understood our complaints completely,” Glover said.

Skagerberg, 63, highlighted the role of her younger co-workers in powering the union campaign. While many older Copperfield’s workers had resigned themselves to subsidizing their bookstore wages with a spouse’s income and healthcare benefits or simply leaving the company for a more lucrative industry once the pay became unsustainable, she’s noticed younger employees tend to look out for each other.

“They’re always checking in with each other; they’re all kind to each other. They’ll say, ‘If you’re overwhelmed, ask somebody else for help. You don’t have to do it all,’” Skagerberg said. “It’s a very connected generation.”

The generational dynamic is present across the nationwide surge in labor activity, according to John Logan, a labor history professor at San Francisco State University, who has been following the Starbucks union campaign closely.

Over the past several decades, service and retail jobs have become a larger portion of the American economy. Now, workers at retail stores, nonprofits, museums, bookstores and other similar businesses are unionizing at an increased rate.

“If you look at the kinds of workers who are most involved in union organizing campaigns right now, they tend to be sort of younger workers, often workers with college degrees or some college education, who are nonetheless working often in low wage service sector jobs,” Logan said.