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San Bernardino County: Growing hot spot for school-run police
In eastern San Bernardino County, a cluster of five school districts take a different approach than nearly all the rest of California when it comes to school policing: they not only buy books for kids, they also buy bullets for cops. They run their own police departments.

There are just 19 school-run police forces in California spread over 10 counties. They include Los Angeles and San Diego unified, the state’s two largest districts. In all, 15% of California K-12 students — more than 863,000 kids — attend districts with their own police departments.

Those students are more likely to be exposed to police than students whose schools rely on officers from municipal police departments or sheriffs offices to respond, a far more common model, an EdSource analysis shows.

Studies show that student exposure to police raises fear and anxiety, especially for students of color who come from over-policed communities where friction with, and distrust of, police are common. A 2021 study by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California found that students of color and disabled students were far more likely to be arrested in schools with assigned officers than those without. Black students’ arrests were 7.4 times higher in schools with assigned law enforcement.

Outside of San Bernardino, school-run police departments are waning. Oakland Unified disbanded its force in 2020 after the videotaped murder of George Floyd, who died at the hands of city police in Minneapolis. Baldwin Park Unified in Los Angeles County closed its in 2021. Inglewood Unified’s will shutter at the end of this month. San Jose’s has but one officer — its chief.

Combined, the 19 school police departments in the state have fewer than 500 officers, state records show. Some have as few as four. Others have had troubles: police chiefs sued, arrested and a department sharply criticized for abusing students. The unified districts with their own police departments are: Apply Valley, Hesperia, San Bernardino City, Fontana Unified and Snowline Joint.

But San Bernardino’s cluster will soon expand. Trustees of the Victor Valley Union High School District, based in Victorville, voted in March to form a police department and begin searching for a chief to head it.

“We need to take our safety to another level,” district Superintendent Carl Coles said prior to the board’s unanimous votes. He cited no crime data or examples of student violence. He told EdSource by email that student suspension rates declined in the last year.

Among the reasons he gave in March: Victor Valley needs to keep up with its neighbors, five districts that have their own police departments, rather than rely on school resource officers provided by contract with the county sheriff.

Board members were quick to agree.

“The way things are right now, our resource officers, they get called away and sometimes you never see them,” trustee Rosalio Hinojos said before the vote. School-employed officers are more stable, always on campuses and “have a good rapport” with students, he said, referring to districts that employ their own officers. “I don’t think that’s happening right now.”

Just before the vote, Hinojos struck an ominous tone, saying it was “not a question of if, but a question of when” police would be needed in the nine-school district. He declined an EdSource request to clarify the remark.

Why San Bernardino?

San Bernardino, the largest U.S. county outside of Alaska and nearly the size of West Virginia, isn’t a place where much discussion about defunding police departments occurred after Floyd’s murder. It’s so deeply conservative that voters approved a 2022 ballot measure instructing officials to explore seceding from California.

“When you look across our county, we do have pockets of areas that may statistically have more crime that takes place,” San Bernardino County Schools Superintendent Ted Alejandre told EdSource.

“That may be one influence on why a school may want to have more protection.” He said his office gives no guidance on the matter, but added that local superintendents and school board members in the Inland Empire have deep interests in “keeping their campuses safe.”

In Fontana, a city of 212,000 known for its steel mill and NASCAR track, school police are deployed “full force at the high schools and middle schools and elementary schools,” board President Marcelino Serna said in an interview.

He cited fear of “school shootings” and potential threats “of people coming on campus,” as primary reasons for the department’s existence. “It’s sad that anyone would want to commit harm to any children. We’re always having to be vigilant.”

The department had 15 sworn officers as of April, state records show. The cops, Serna said, like to show off their police cars and dogs to students, as well as “their weaponry, if kids are wanting to see that.”

In nearby Apple Valley, a town of 75,000, police presence on campuses became spotty because deputies from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department were often called away from schools to perform other duties, Rick Roelle, an Apple Valley Unified School District board member and retired sheriff’s lieutenant, said in an interview.

That “would leave the schools kind of high and dry,” he said. The district formed its own police force in 2002. It had nine officers as of April, records show.

Apple Valley Unified has experienced rises in “drug use, violence and disruptive behavior,” Roelle said. “What we’re seeing today is violence where kids are getting kicked in the head, and they’re getting smashed up against walls, and they’re getting severely injured on campus. So, if there’s no police there to take someone into custody for doing that, who’s going to do it?”

An EdSource investigation into school policing gathered nearly 46,000 logs of calls for police from and about a sample of California schools from Jan. 15, 2023 to June 30, 2023. In Apple Valley, 4.9% of its nearly 1,500 calls were for fights, assaults, battery, and disturbing the peace — the second-lowest rate among the 10 districts with their own police departments included in EdSource’s sample. Inglewood Unified led the category with nearly half of its 196 calls reporting such events.

Apple Valley Superintendent Trenae Nelson declined interview requests, as did school Police Chief Cesar Molina. Nelson also didn’t respond to emailed questions about the police department.

Comparing districts with their own police and those that rely on outside departments:
- Students in high schools with district-run police were more likely to encounter officers than other high schools. The average number of calls for police was 88 in districts with their own departments compared with 57 in districts with outside police.
- School districts that employ police officers break up fights more than other districts: 4.6% of incidents in high schools without in-house departments were calls about fighting or disturbing the peace, compared with 6.6% in high schools with outside police.
- School district police officers are dispatched to counsel students over 10 times more than other officers. In the 76 high schools with their own departments, police officers were dispatched to counsel students 63 times, and in the 209 high schools without their own district officers, they were called 16 times.
Police “really are just ill-suited to address mental health concerns, not because of training, but really it’s not their role or their expertise to be handling these types of things,” said Cal State Long Beach education associate professor Caroline Lopez-Perry, who studies school counseling.

Carl Cohn, a former State Board of Education member and superintendent at Long Beach Unified in the 1990s, said he was pressured to create a district police department by the school board after the 1992 riots triggered by the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.

A board member who was a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff “was adamant we needed it,” Cohn said.

But Cohn said he was skeptical, thinking, “Do we need to take scarce resources and actually set up our own school-district police force?” He had long meetings with city officials trying to create a coverage plan using Long Beach police officers that would meet district needs. When the department’s chief told him, “‘Look, if we can’t protect kids we shouldn’t be in business,’’ he went with the city. It was a decision he doesn’t regret. Other superintendents have expressed regrets to him over having school departments, calling them a financial drain, he said.

Who’s watching the watchers?

When school officials sign contracts with cities or sheriffs for school policing or just rely on responses to 911 calls, they tap into a system where a city manager oversees police, and in some cities where police commissions add a level of oversight. Elected sheriffs are answerable to voters about their departments.

When school districts create their own police departments, they take on that oversight themselves, which in California comes with laws limiting public accountability and granting officers deep job protection and privacy rights.

“Police just do a better job when they have accountability,” said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog. At small agencies like school-police departments, more power is vested in fewer individuals, like a chief or small cadre of officers. They may not have trained internal affairs investigators, leaving chiefs to conduct their own misconduct probes. “There’s just not the infrastructure.” At small public agencies, “There’s little oversight that’s happening outside of the department as well.”

A leading California policing expert agreed.

“Any department or any entity that polices itself is ripe for corruption,” said retired state Superior Court Judge LaDoris H. Cordell, the first Black woman appointed to the bench in Northern California. She also worked for five years as the City of San Jose’s independent police auditor.

In response to EdSource questions to districts regarding outside oversight, officials at seven districts reported having none. Stockton Unified reported it has a community advisory group “which meets quarterly and reviews quarterly reports on employee statistics, complaints, and calls for service,” Superintendent Michelle Rodriguez told EdSource. In Riverside County, Val Verde Unified has a group of students, parents and others that meet with police but don’t have oversight authority.

While independent oversight of all law enforcement is critical, Cordell said, it should be especially so for school-run departments, considering they primarily police children. As San Jose’s police auditor, she published a multilanguage student handbook titled “A Student’s Guide to Police Practices” that advised juveniles on their rights during police encounters.

Her main concern about school policing, she said, is inequitable treatment of students of color. Some police “focus primarily on kids of color, Black and brown kids,” she said. “Just the melanin in the skin raises suspicion.”

Scandals

In April, the state Department of Justice (DOJ) ended five years of oversight of the Stockton Unified police after an investigation found officers “routinely violated the civil and constitutional rights of Black and Latino students and students with disabilities.”

DOJ investigators found police routinely arrested the students for “defiance, disorderly context, fights without injuries, using profanity and loitering” that civilian personnel should have handled.

“School police were out of control, arresting and traumatizing kids for acting like kids,” Linnea Nelson, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California said in a statement. “Those disparities still exist, and we will continue to monitor the District’s progress to prevent resurgent discrimination.”

Stockton school police took “important steps to address concerns regarding

interactions between police officers and students and to promote an equitable and positive learning environment,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.

There have also been problems at school police departments involving leadership.

A former chief and lieutenant of the Inglewood school police department are scheduled for sentencing Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court after being charged in a 2022 corruption investigation.

According to court records, the former department lieutenant, Timothy Marks, hired then-Chief William T. Carter as a security guard at a marijuana facility in San Bernardino County. Carter worked there when he was supposed be on duty at the police department. He “boasted to his security coworkers of his ability to do whatever he wanted because he was a police chief,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, adding, Carter drove his school-police car to the job “using his lights and sirens to get there faster.”

After being charged with embezzlement, conspiracy and perjury, Carter and Marks both cut deals and pleaded no contest in April to petty theft. Carter agreed to repay the district $15,722 and Marks, $3,006. The agreement calls for each man to be sentenced to 50 hours of community service and a year of probation.

James Morris, a former school superintendent who is working to help the district out of years of state receivership because of fiscal woes, said he is “pleased that the outcome will return funding to the students of Inglewood Unified.”

In San Diego, Chief Alfonso Contreras of the school district police department abruptly retired last month after less than two years in the post after 11 officers — nearly a third of the department’s ranks — sued him in December. Those officers alleged that Conteras and several supervisors who are his friends, and one with whom he is romantically involved, discriminated against others based on sexual orientation, gender and race. Conteras had been on paid suspension since January. The lawsuit remains in early stages, court records show. San Diego Unified spokesperson Maureen Magee said she couldn’t discuss ongoing litigation.

A chief’s perspective

The president of the California Association of School Police Chiefs disagrees that these agencies, typically smaller than most municipalities’, need more oversight.

At smaller agencies, “you have to be even more critical of your department and policies to ensure you are always in compliance,” Mark Clark, chief of the Val Verde Unified School District Police in Perris, Riverside County, wrote in an email in response to questions.

Clark, who’s spent his career at school departments, said that the in-school department offers school districts more control over how officers on their campuses are hired and trained.

Clark wrote that he formed Val Verde’s committee in 2017. It’s made up of parents, staff, students and other organizations within the district that have made recommendations to the board on procedures, staffing, and equipment. Although it is not an oversight panel, its input has been helpful, he said.

The committee, he said, has offered “nothing but support for hiring more officers.”

EdSource reporter Michael Burke contributed to this story.
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26/05/2025
Cal Maritime pleads for merger with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to save the academy

Cal Maritime is the smallest campus in the California State University system.

Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr

This story has been updated to include reporting from the Board of Trustees meeting on Tuesday.

A steep drop in enrollment has put Cal Maritime, the smallest of the California State University’s 23 campuses, on a path to merge with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Under the plan, which went before the Cal State board of trustees Tuesday, Cal Maritime’s 761 students would blend into San Luis Obispo’s 22,000-person student body with the goal of saving on overhead and ultimately attracting more students to the maritime academy.

Recruiting out-of-state students and competing for federal dollars are two pieces of the turnaround plan, according to newly released details about the proposal.

But faculty at both institutions said they have received little guidance about how the plan would impact their day-to-day jobs. And CSU officials’ proposal to the board does not address what one investigation into sexual harassment at Cal Maritime called a “history of pervasive male toxicity.”

The CSU board of trustees opened discussions on the proposal on Tuesday and plan to raise the subject again in September. A vote on the proposed integration is set for November. If approved, CSU officials estimate bringing the two institutions together will cost $35 million over seven years. The plan would go into effect in July 2025 and affect students in the fall of 2026.

Cal Maritime Interim President Michael J. Dumont appealed to the Board of Trustees to support the proposal on Tuesday, saying the campus has already made deep budget cuts that include leaving positions unfilled. Without dramatic improvement in the campus’ enrollment and revenue, Dumont said he does not “see the maritime academy continuing.”

“Quite frankly, we’ve taken a chainsaw to every expense on our campus,” he said. “We are working drastically to save money everywhere we can. I don’t know how much longer that can continue … I have cut muscle, bone, and I’m now down to tendon and arteries.”

In response to questions seeking more information about admissions, degree conferral and recruitment strategy under the proposal, CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said it would “be speculative and premature to respond to questions about details yet to be determined.” Bentley-Smith said privacy concerns limit what the university can say regarding incidents and reports related to Title IX, the federal sex discrimination law. She said Cal Maritime responds “appropriately with measures aimed at holding individuals accountable for their actions and providing equity to affected members of the community. The university has placed a great deal of focus, energy and commitment on creating a stronger culture of safety and inclusion on campus and on cruise.”

Cal Maritime, which has a campus in Vallejo and operates a training ship, serves a strategically important niche in higher education. Six state maritime academies together educate most of the nation’s merchant marine officers, the civilian workforce that operates commercial shipping vessels and supplies U.S. military ships and bases. Almost 80% of Cal Maritime students are men, according to fall 2022 enrollment data.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, located 250 miles south, is known for its architecture, agriculture and engineering programs. The campus has increased enrollment by 13% over the past decade and receives more qualified applicants than it can accommodate.

Merging the campuses would bolster both institutions’ academic strengths in areas like engineering, oceanography, logistics and marine science while allowing degree programs that lead to a merchant marine license from the U.S. Coast Guard to continue, according to the CSU proposal. Cal Maritime would also enjoy access to Cal Poly’s marketing and fundraising resources — a leg up to recruit prospective students and right the school’s finances.

If the marriage of the two schools goes forward, the maritime academy would be led by a superintendent who is also part of Cal Poly leadership, according to documents describing the proposal. Maritime academy faculty and staff, similarly, would become Cal Poly employees.

Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo campus.
Credit: Ashley Bolter / EdSource

Righting the ship

Cal Maritime’s finances are so dire that last spring the university projected that it would have only $317,000 in operating reserves at the end of June 2024 — less than it would need to run the university for three days, according to the merger proposal.

Declining enrollment is a major culprit. Student headcount fell 31% between the 2016-17 and 2023-24 school years. Even if Cal Maritime meets future enrollment targets, Cal State officials write, a growing budget deficit “is inevitable.”

The campus has already slashed spending to save money, CSU officials say, but further cuts would threaten the university’s ability to carry out its educational mission. As it is, CSU officials acknowledge that falling enrollment and budget woes may have had “an impact on the quality of essential student support services such as housing, dining, health and counseling.”

The hope is that maritime academy students will benefit from plugging into Cal Poly’s student services.

Other changes would be subtle. The maritime academy would keep its Vallejo campus during the integration, though additional majors with maritime industry ties could be located there in the future.

Kyle Carpenter, who graduated from Cal Maritime in 2014, said he hopes the proposal can save Cal Maritime. But depending on whether and how majors are folded into Cal Poly, he said, he worries that students who are now required to understand the maritime application of their education could lose that important focus.

“We need to maintain a strong maritime presence, so any bit of maritime education is a great thing,” Carpenter said.

The proposal flags possible benefits for Cal Poly students, too. First among them: Cal Poly students would get access to Cal Maritime laboratory space and, crucially, a $360 million training vessel the campus is set to receive in 2026.

The chance to take advantage of the Vallejo campus is welcome news to Yiming Luo, a sophomore city and regional planning major at Cal Poly. He said he hopes the proposal would expand course offerings and give Cal Poly students from the Bay Area like him the “possibility of taking classes at Maritime over the summer for credit.”

Faculty react

Faculty at both campuses said they have lots of questions about how the proposal could impact them.

Steven Runyon, an associate professor of chemistry at Cal Maritime and vice president of the campus California Faculty Association chapter, said the proposed integration “came out of nowhere” and has garnered mixed reactions.

“Many faculty are very optimistic,” he said. “If we’re going to be integrated with any other university, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is probably top of our list in terms of who we would like to be associated with.”

But Runyon said a lack of clear communication from the university’s leaders makes him worry about how the proposal would impact colleagues, especially those who do not work in a tenure track position, such as lecturers and librarians.

Faculty learned of the merger plan when it was announced on June 5. They can comment “both individually and through their represented body” before the board acts, a Cal Maritime spokesperson said.

Jennifer Mott, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly, said she has heard little about the proposed integration.

“Will we have to teach more students? Will they be teaching more students?” she said. “Will it not affect anything? We just don’t know any information.”

Mott also questions whether her department would remain independent or merge with Cal Maritime’s mechanical engineering department — a process that would impact her department’s gender makeup.

“We made a huge push in mechanical engineering to hire more women faculty,” she said. “I looked at the faculty (at Cal Maritime) and it’s only men, and so I don’t know how that would affect us going forward.”

Cal Maritime is one of six state maritime academies in the country.
Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr

A reckoning with sexual misconduct

Reports of sexual misconduct in both the maritime industry and the California State University system have put pressure on Cal Maritime to do more to address sexual misconduct on its campus.

In 2021, an outside investigator commissioned by Cal Maritime reported “several instances of inappropriate, discriminatory, vulgar or offensive writings or other imagery, especially toward female cadets” as well as “concerns over anti-LGBTQIA+ behavior and language used frequently aboard cruises and on campus.”

A Los Angeles Times investigation echoed those issues and found that Cal Maritime failed to follow consistent procedures to address reports of sexual misconduct.

The resignation of Joseph I. Castro as CSU chancellor in 2022 over his mishandling of a Title IX sexual harassment case involving an administrator when he was president of Fresno State resulted in a system-wide reckoning. Cal State retained the law firm Cozen O’Connor to assess programs at each of its 23 universities to deal with sexual harassment and assault complaints under the federal Title IX law that prohibits sex-based discrimination. The probe found that the system lacks resources and staffing to adequately respond to and handle sexual harassment or discrimination complaints from students and employees.

At Cal Maritime, a July 2023 report by the firm found “significant improvements to process, responsiveness, training, and prevention programming” over the previous two years. But Cozen O’Connor reported that those improvements were overshadowed by a lack of a permanent Title IX coordinator, distrust of former university leaders and a culture that discouraged reporting misconduct.

Cal Maritime now has a six-person Title IX implementation team, including a director of Title IX, to implement Cozen O’Connor’s recommendations.

In March 2023, Cal State hired Mike Dumont to serve as the maritime academy’s interim president. A 2024 profile of Dumont in the San Francisco Chronicle names several recent reforms at the campus, including improving training on sexual harassment, hiring a full-time victim advocate and updating uniform, naming and housing policies to meet the needs of nonbinary and transgender students.

In a statement, Bentley-Smith said the work of improving campus safety and inclusion “continues and will continue, both at Cal Maritime and throughout the CSU. One of the CSU’s highest priorities is ensuring all students and employees across our 23 universities are protected from discrimination and harassment.”

This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring CSU to implement the recommendations of a state audit into its handling of sexual misconduct. CSU officials say the system is already in the process of meeting the audit requirements.

But Mott, the Cal Poly professor, said reports of sexual harassment and assault at Cal Maritime give her pause.

“I know it’s an issue across a lot of campuses, not to say that we don’t have issues here,” she said. “But if it is a more toxic culture up there (at Cal Maritime), that is definitely a concern that we don’t bring that here, or that the students aren’t forced to go up there if they don’t feel comfortable going to that environment.”

Funding from fees, feds and more

The proposal anticipates a combined institution could raise more philanthropic and federal dollars. It is possible Cal Poly’s fee model — increasing one fee and levying a second on out-of-state undergraduates to pay for more financial aid — could be applied to the maritime academy.

The proposal also argues that Cal Maritime has a great story to tell prospective students and can use San Luis Obispo’s “unquestioned expertise in strategic enrollment management, marketing and brand-building” to tell it.

One draw is graduates’ future earnings. An analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that a Cal Maritime degree had the highest return on investment of any bachelor’s degree from a public university in California as measured by its net present value.

Under the proposal, increased outreach would extend to prospective students in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. Pacific territories.

Michael Fossum, the superintendent of the Texas A&M Maritime Academy, said maritime academy graduates are in high demand. But schools like his don’t always have the marketing budget to pitch prospective students on pursuing the career.

“It’s a massive industry that people don’t know about,” he said. “We don’t have the reach to help educate people on how important the industry is and what great opportunities there are working in this industry.”

‘A nationally known name’

If the integration proposal wins board approval, Cal Maritime’s future might look a little more like Fossum’s institution, Texas A&M Maritime Academy.

The Texas maritime academy is not an independent institution, but is part of Texas A&M at Galveston. In terms of leadership structure, Fossum, the school’s superintendent, is also chief operating officer at Texas A&M University at Galveston and a vice president at Texas A&M University. That structure reduces some overhead on his campus.

“I don’t have to replicate every single vice president and every single function that’s on the main campus,” Fossum said.

The Cal Maritime integration proposal suggests the two campuses could experience similar consolidation in areas such as facilities maintenance, information technology, cybersecurity and administrative services like payroll and accounting.

Fossum said he hopes that if Cal Maritime links up with Cal Poly, it will enjoy some of the same reputational benefits his campus experiences from its close association with Texas A&M.

“Cal Poly has got a nationally known name,” he said. “When you get the power of Cal Poly, just like me having the power of Texas A&M University, that absolutely helps. The association is good.”

Ashley Bolter, a recent graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.

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20/05/2025
Can a final push save San Francisco State’s marine research campus on the bay?
Katharyn Boyer, the interim executive director of San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, walks the grounds of the Romberg Tiburon campus on Feb. 13, 2025.

Amy DiPierro, EdSource
Top Takeaways

University says attempts to make the Romberg Tiburon campus financially self-sustaining have fallen short.

The likely closure shows the challenges facing some Cal State campuses amid tepid enrollment, anticipated state budget cuts and a maintenance backlog.

One researcher’s specialty is studying eelgrass, a plant important to sustaining the bay ecosystem.
To the untrained eye, the eelgrass in San Francisco Bay is unremarkable, a slimy marine plant easily mistaken for seaweed. But to the ecologist, it is essential: a natural carbon storage system, a hedge against climate change, and a protector of shorelines threatened by rising seas.

That’s why Katharyn Boyer, a biology professor who leads San Francisco State University’s estuary and ocean science center in Marin County, has spent much of her career studying how to restore and maintain the bay’s underwater meadows of ribbon-like eelgrass. It’s an effort growing more urgent as climate change nudges sea levels ever higher.

Working for the past two decades at the marine research campus, a 13-mile drive north of San Francisco, Boyer and her colleagues have trained the next generation of scientists and conservationists. Budding researchers hone their field skills at the site, where saltwater tanks act as a temporary home for eelgrass plants waiting to be replanted in the bay. “You really have to treat the plants well while you’re doing this restoration work,” Boyer said. “Having this nice, cool, natural supply of water — it’s the perfect kind of condition.”

Seawater tanks at Romberg Tiburon provide a temporary home for eelgrass.

But the 53-acre marine research campus where Boyer works could soon close as the university contends with declining enrollment and a likely cut to state funding.

San Francisco State says it can no longer afford to keep the lights on at the site, a former Navy base now called the Romberg Tiburon campus. Since the university announced plans to close Romberg Tiburon in February, Boyer has redoubled efforts to secure enough outside funding to save it. As of last week, Boyer said, San Francisco State finance officials have indicated that the funds she has raised are not enough. The site would start to wind down over the coming months unless a last-minute solution emerges.

“You can bring in the grant money, but you have trouble with covering your basic operations costs,” Boyer said while walking the property on a blustery day. “I don’t think it’s a unique problem here. It just has gotten to the point where our university is just struggling so much financially that it’s hard to justify the costs of it.

“That’s very hard for us to take because we think that we do — and we know that the community thinks what we do — is really valuable,” Boyer added, as a gust of wind blew her ball cap from her head.

The plan to close Romberg Tiburon is one sign of how lower enrollments are setting off a financial domino effect at some California State University campuses. While some campuses, especially those in Southern California, attract a growing student body, San Francisco State’s enrollment fell 26% between 2015 and 2024. That means San Francisco State will receive less money not only from student tuition but also from the 23-campus Cal State system. All of that could be crunched further by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to reduce funding to CSU and the University of California by almost 8%.

Reductions are surfacing in varied forms at CSU campuses. Sports teams and the geology department are among the cuts proposed at Sonoma State University. Cal State East Bay will close its downtown Oakland conference and classroom center when its lease ends in June. Sacramento State, where enrollment is up 2% year-to-year, plans to cut $24 million from its department of academic affairs over the next two years. Even Cal State San Marcos, among the system’s fastest-growing campuses, is offering retirement incentives to manage a tight budget.

Amy Sueyoshi, San Francisco State’s provost, said her campus is “scaling back everywhere,” with at least 30 faculty members leaving each year and only a handful joining to replace them.

“At this point, with our limited resources, it’s actually not OK for us to have so much of our resources flowing in a direction that doesn’t serve our undergraduate students directly,” she said.

Romberg Tiburon — named for Paul Romberg, who was president of San Francisco State when the university took over the site — is also an example of the worsening condition of facilities across CSU. San Francisco State estimates the Romberg Tiburon campus needs about $4 million in critical safety repairs. Such expenses barely scratch the surface of the roughly $8 billion maintenance backlog around the Cal State system.

What happens next to the marine campus is uncertain. Boyer continues to seek donors or nonprofits interested in leasing the site. San Francisco State plans to give all estuary and ocean science faculty an opportunity to relocate to the main campus, though lab space is limited. But Boyer says the transition only guarantees lab space to tenured faculty and may leave nontenured faculty, in effect, “homeless,” complicating things for their graduate students.

“There’s a lot of people’s careers and livelihoods that are at stake,” she said.

A marine lab ‘in the middle of gritty San Francisco Bay’

In mid-February, Boyer walked the grounds of the Tiburon campus wearing a parka and baseball cap, a stadium umbrella tucked under one arm in case the scattered drizzle turned into a downpour. To the north, the ghostly outline of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge emerged from the fog like a half-finished sketch leading east to the unseen Chevron refinery on the opposite side of the bay.

Marine laboratories tend to be located in remote places, where scientists study life in pristine ecosystems relatively untainted by human interference. Romberg Tiburon breaks that mold.

“This one is in the middle of the gritty San Francisco Bay, with all of the problems of the large population that we have here, all of the impacts that that creates, all the opportunities for restoration and conservation that that creates,” Boyer said.

Boyer pointed out barracks and other holdovers from the site’s past lives as a Navy base, coaling station and nautical training school. San Francisco State established a research beachhead at Tiburon in 1978, taking over ownership from the federal government. Today, researchers work out of Delta Hall, a converted warehouse from the 1940s.

A former coal trestle frames a barracks building at the Romberg Tiburon campus on Feb. 13, 2025.
Amy DiPierro, EdSource

Working along the shoreline makes it possible to offer hands-on classes in wetlands ecology and biological oceanography, including for undergraduates, Boyer said. “It’s an amazing place to do that, because [students] can do experiments here,” she said. “They can develop a hypothesis and test it from start to finish over the course of a semester.”

The marine research campus currently hosts about 30 graduate students, Boyer said, and as many as 100 undergraduates use the Tiburon campus in a typical year. Recent master’s students have landed jobs at places like the Environmental Protection Agency and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Even with those success stories, Sueyoshi said a master’s program through the estuary and ocean science center has already been discontinued due to a lack of students.

The campus is also showing its age and a lack of upkeep. Signs emblazoned “DANGER” and “RESTRICTED AREA” urge visitors to stay away from buildings whose chipped paint exposes wood beneath.

As recently as 2019, San Francisco State sketched blueprints to redevelop and repurpose buildings on the site. One plan suggested a reinvigorated campus could “amplify SF State’s social justice legacy” and proposed building new housing and academic space while refurbishing existing facilities.

Such ambitions would require a private developer to purchase and invest in the campus, Sueyoshi said, adding that San Francisco State has also explored returning the site to the federal government or persuading other universities to take it over.

A view of San Francisco Bay from the Romberg Tiburon campus on Feb. 13, 2025.
Amy DiPierro, EdSource

‘You can’t just rebuild it’

As the financial pressures on San Francisco State have grown, many faculty at the Romberg Tiburon campus now raise the money to pay their own salaries through state and federal grants, Boyer said, rather than relying on San Francisco State. The Tiburon campus also earns money by leasing space, including an onsite conference center, to third parties.

Entrepreneurial efforts aside, the Tiburon campus still counts on San Francisco State for some important costs, including the salaries of facilities and administrative staff members as well as tenured faculty, a university statement noted.

A tight budget has not stopped San Francisco State from investing in other campus improvements. The university combined funding from CSU and private donors to build a new 125,000-square-foot science and engineering building on its main campus, which opened last year. In April, it unveiled a new student housing project that includes a health center and dining hall, funded in part by a state grant.

But the lack of long-term funding for Romberg Tiburon leaves Boyer’s eelgrass projects in limbo. She expects to continue the work at Tiburon through the fall, “but after this field season, basically, I don’t know,” she said.

A chain of interconnected life relies on eelgrass to thrive. As the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, it becomes less hospitable to oysters and, in turn, less welcoming to birds like the appropriately-named black oystercatcher. But beds of spindly green eelgrass capture carbon, creating a refuge for native oysters and a marine buffet for birds of prey.

Once lost, it is an ecosystem that can be labor-intensive to restore. It’s the kind of work that Marilyn Latta, a project manager at the California State Coastal Conservancy, said requires “early mornings, wetsuits, boat access, all sorts of hard work that’s best suited for a shoreline, marine science location on the water” like the Romberg Tiburon campus.

“If we were to lose that expertise,” she said, “you can’t just rebuild it.”
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08/05/2025
San Francisco schools must avoid state takeover at all costs, education veteran warns

A sign in support of public school is seen outside a home next to Sutro Elementary School in San Francisco on Oct. 9, 2024. The school is among the 11 schools previously proposed for closure within San Francisco Unified School District amid decline in enrollment and budgetary woes.

Credit: Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via AP

San Francisco must do everything it can to avert a state takeover of its schools.

That’s the stark message brought by Carl A. Cohn, the only outside educator to be brought in to help the team of city administrators set up by Mayor London Breed to help the school district overcome multiple crises, including a looming budget shortage, declining enrollment, and the departure of its superintendent, the second in two years.

“I remain a huge fan of local control,” said Cohn, a revered figure in education circles in California and nationally. “I fundamentally believe that if historically underserved students are going to be rescued, it is going to be by locals, not by state government or higher levels of authority.”

Carl A. Cohn

The challenges facing the 48,000-student district are being experienced to some degree by many others around the state. Just across the San Francisco Bay, Oakland Unified and West Contra Costa Unified, which includes Richmond, are grappling with comparable challenges.

San Francisco’s, however, seem especially acute.

“I think the loss of federal pandemic relief funds, coupled with declining enrollments will make things difficult for most districts, but San Francisco is probably ahead of the curve on this,” he said.

There’s little that Cohn, who projects calm and reassurance but can also be disarmingly direct, has not seen in his 50 years in an array of roles in public education.

He was superintendent of the San Diego and Long Beach school districts, the second- and third-largest in California after Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD). His 10-year tenure at Long Beach was especially noteworthy for fostering academic excellence and accountability, resulting in the district winning the prestigious Broad Prize For Urban Education.

He was appointed to the State Board of Education by then Gov. Jerry Brown, who later recruited him to lead a new state agency, the California Collaborative for Education Excellence.

He has been brought in to deal with various trouble spots over the years. He co-chaired a commission of the National Academy of Sciences to look into whether District of Columbia schools had exaggerated their academic results under the leadership of Michelle Rhee, then arguably the best-known, and most controversial, school superintendent in the nation.

He was the court-appointed monitor overseeing a consent decree to improve special education in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Currently, he is co-leading an initiative with Harvard professor Jennifer Cheatham to prepare school superintendents to cope with the political polarization roiling school districts across the country.

He has also been a mentor to generations of school superintendents, and trained many of them as a professor at Claremont Graduate University, and at the University of Southern California before that.

Cohn has never had to close schools himself and says that San Francisco must do everything it can to find alternatives to doing so. That is similar to a mindset Breed appears also to have embraced, and was a major reason behind the resignation of Superintendent Matt Wayne last week.

For now, at least, school closure plans are on hold. “The challenge with closing schools from a symbolic point of view is that it can be seen as the beginning of the death of a community,” Cohn says.

“There are multiple ways to cut a school district budget,” he says. “And if you have to, there are ways to do it so it is not a huge negative.”

He recalls being sent to Inglewood Unified a dozen years ago by then-State Board President Michael Kirst to take stock of the deep financial hole the Southern California district was in.

He found a lackadaisical attitude among school officials about the prospect of a state administrator with the power to overrule local decisionmaking. “They seemed to think the takeover wasn’t such a big deal, that after the bailout they would get their authority back,” he says. “And here we are, 12 years later, with the district nowhere near having an elected school board with any authority.”

The district is still overseen by an administrator appointed by the county.

Cohn has yet to meet Breed, but two weeks ago he came from Palm Springs, where he is based, to meet with the mayor’s School Stabilization Team made up of top San Francisco officials, co-led by Maria Su, the longtime head of the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. In an unexpected move last week, the school board appointed Su to be the new superintendent, at least until June 2026.

He points out that, unlike other large urban districts in California, the city of San Francisco commendably contributes funding to its schools, which means it has a more direct stake in their functioning.

What is essential is strict oversight over how the district spends its money, he says. He recalls the first day he was given a tour of the administration offices at Long Beach Unified as a 31-year-old educator in the district.

On the second floor was a tiny office with a sign on the door reading “Position Control” right next to the budget office. He was told it was the most powerful office in the district — one that determined what staff could be hired at a school. “Even if you were the superintendent you could not get a position filled unless Position Control said it was in the current budget.”

In addition, each year the district’s research office issued what was called a “quota bulletin,” which decreed how many employees a school qualified for based on its enrollment. Its edicts, he says, were “treated as a sacred document that had been handed down from Mt. Sinai.”

A similar parsimonious ethos is in place in parochial schools. “What is notable about these schools is that they are not over resourced,” said Cohn, who advises the California Catholic Conference on its schools. “You won’t find an assistant principal, a counselor, a reading specialist unless the school has the enrollment to support it.”

“My impression is that these types of controls were not present in the San Francisco school system,” he says. “It’s important for spending to be based on actual enrollment and not on wishful spending.”

He says it would be important to bring all key parties together — the mayor’s stabilization team, incoming Superintendent Su and her deputy, board representatives, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, and the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state-sponsored oversight agency — and put them all in the same room to have a “candid conversation.”

“Getting a handle on what exactly they need to do to retain local control seems like a real important value,” he said.

One thing schools can have no impact on is declining birthrates, Cohn points out. So other strategies to attract and retain students will be needed.

He notes that San Francisco has many private, parochial and charter groups — more than most communities. He suggests conducting focus groups with people who are opting out of more traditional public schools to find out more precisely “what it is that those schools are offering that San Francisco isn’t.”

That could suggest strategies that San Francisco could offer — from more child care to innovative magnet schools — to support families and to encourage them to enroll their children in district schools.

San Francisco schools are especially vulnerable to being taken over by the state. In recent years, when the state bails out a district financially, authority to appoint an administrator has been delegated to the county offices of education. But because San Francisco is both a city and a county, it would be subject to, in Cohn’s words,”an old-fashioned state administrator.”

With Mayor Breed up for reelection in two weeks, and with four of seven school board seats also on the ballot, the district faces many unknowns.

Regardless of what happens on Election Day, Cohn says a fundamental issue the district has to address is “what kinds of resources a school gets based on its enrollment so that future spending doesn’t spiral out of control because someone thinks ‘I need this’ or “I need that.’”

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07/05/2025
Cal Maritime’s merger with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo approved

The California State University board of trustees discusses a proposal to merge Cal Maritime and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on Nov. 20, 2024.

Credit: Amy DiPierro / EdSource

This story was updated on Nov. 21 following a Cal State board of trustees vote approving the merger.

California State University approved a merger uniting the financially troubled Cal Maritime in Vallejo, its smallest campus, with the university system’s most selective institution, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

The full board of trustees greenlighted the merger proposal Thursday, a decision designed to keep the maritime academy in operation following enrollment declines that threatened its financial viability as an independent institution. The decision followed Wednesday’s unanimous vote for the merger by the trustees’ Joint Committee on Finance and Educational Policy.

System officials argue that combining the two Cal State locations will ultimately benefit both universities. Cal Poly will gain access to maritime academy facilities including a $360 million training vessel and pier; Cal Maritime hopes to boost the number of students seeking merchant marine licenses.

“Please do not think of this as a contraction of the system,” said Chancellor Mildred García in remarks following the committee vote. “This is indeed an expansion — an expansion of opportunity for current and future students, of authentic and equitable access,” she said, as well as a benefit to the maritime industry.

The system will face a tight timeline to unite the two institutions under the same administration by July 1, 2025. After that deadline, the combined university plans to continue under the Cal Poly name, and Cal Maritime will be rechristened Cal Poly, Solano Campus. The intent is for all students at the newly merged university to be enrolled as Cal Poly students starting in fall 2026.

The Solano campus will be led by a vice president and CEO reporting to Cal Poly’s president. A superintendent with the rank of rear admiral in the U.S. Maritime Service will lead the maritime academy, which will remain in Vallejo.

Cal State envisions a blitz of activity as 2025 and 2026 deadlines approach, including navigating accreditation processes and updating the curriculum. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to revive the number of students earning their merchant mariner licenses, programs which will be housed at a renamed entity called the Cal Poly Maritime Academy pending approval from the U.S. Maritime Administration and other agencies. Merchant marines are the civilian workforce responsible for operating commercial shipping vessels; they also supply U.S. military ships and bases.

The maritime academy is due to receive a new, 700-student training vessel in 2026, but the school’s interim president, Michael J. Dumont, has warned that without a merger, Cal Maritime “is not going to be able to operate that ship because it won’t have the people to do it. It won’t have the budget to support it.”

Cal Maritime has 804 students enrolled this fall. To boost that number, Cal State officials have said “substantial investments in recruitment and marketing” at high schools must begin now.

Officials have said cratering enrollment — headcount tumbled 31% between the 2016-17 and 2023-24 school years – and rising operating expenses are to blame for Cal Maritime’s difficult financial position.

Dumont said in an email to the campus in August that the campus expected to notch a $3.1 million budget deficit in the 2024-25 school year, counting deficits in both its general operating and housing funds. This fall, the campus laid off 10 employees as the school year started.

Steve Relyea, Cal State’s chief financial officer, and Nathan Evans, the system’s chief academic officer, framed the merger choice as one between combining the two institutions quickly or preparing to close the maritime academy. Presentations to the board co-led by Dumont and Cal Poly President Jeffrey D. Armstrong also note that Cal Maritime’s situation has been worsened by a flurry of departures among important campus leaders, among them its chief financial officer. Cal Maritime has tried to cover for those positions by striking agreements with Cal Poly, Cal State officials said in September, creating “the problematic misperception that leadership is moving ahead with the integration before board action in November.”

Cal State formed 23 workgroups to study issues relevant to the merger, which it has since reorganized around a handful of themes like academics and enrollment.

Both faculty senate and student government representatives are already contemplating what it will take to knit the two institutions together, including questions about how to blend existing governance structures and distribute fees that support student government, according to a memo summarizing the process. Faculty additionally have been tasked to identify “overlapping, adjacencies and duplication in academic programming and curricula,” the memo said.

Dustin Stegner, chair of the English department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and a statewide senator in the Academic Senate of the CSU system, said he was amazed by the committee members’ enthusiasm for the proposal.

“This was born out of a financial crisis of Cal Maritime not being sustainable, and it is being described as a great opportunity for the whole system,” he said. “It certainly seems like making a lot of lemonade out of a lot of lemons.”

Stegner, who has served on one of the workgroups assembled to provide feedback on the integration proposal, said he is still waiting for the board of trustees to address questions about whether faculty members’ job security could be impacted by the merger. He said there are also open questions about whether the combined university will offer more online courses in order to reach students on both campuses and whether students who switch majors may also be permitted to switch campuses.

Cal State representatives have not yet decided which metrics the system should use to gauge the merger’s progress. Financially, Cal State will be eying anticipated cost savings and also checking to make sure absorbing the maritime academy “does not become a financial burden to Cal Poly,” according to a memo to the board. Updates on areas like how many students are enrolling in programs that yield a merchant mariner license and the student body’s diversity are also expected. CSU officials anticipate a report updating the board on the merger’s progress next May.

The university system has hired consulting firm Baker Tilly as an adviser to guide the merger effort and monitor its success based on the to-be-determined accountability metrics. System records show the chancellor’s office inked a $500,000 contract with the firm in September.

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03/05/2025