Santa Barbara City Council and School District Hold Meeting of the Minds

It was a rare opportunity for the entire Santa Barbara City Council and Santa Barbara Unified School District’s Board of Education to sit down and check in with each other on Monday, as both groups gathered for a joint session to discuss the current programming offered to Santa Barbara’s youth through the city and the school district, and reaffirm their priorities as the new school year approaches.

As S.B. Unified schools prepare to welcome students next week, the city and the district are evaluating how best to work together to rebound after the pandemic — with students struggling both academically and socially — and how to provide as many resources as possible despite tightening the budget across the board.

S.B. Unified Superintendent Hilda Maldonado, whose contract was recently extended through 2026, opened up the round-table meeting by saying she sees the city and the school district as “separate but intertwined entities serving the same community,” and that they have “mutual interests” to serve the students of Santa Barbara.

A New Approach

During the joint session, city and district staff provided an outline of what is currently available to Santa Barbara students, from Parks and Recreation programs to Public Library resources to new models of teaching literacy and emotional wellness.

Assistant Superintendent ShaKenya Edison provided a big-picture look at how the district is approaching youth engagement and wellness in schools. It starts with making sure that, while schools are primarily focused on the “A’s” of academics, arts, and athletics, there is a bigger emphasis on “belonging, community, and collaboration.”

To be successful, students need to feel that they belong, she said, and this means that all district employees must be trained in the social and emotional aspects of working with children. Using a rule of fives, Edison explained that every student should be able to identify “at least five” trusted adults they can go to in times of need. That means that teachers, campus safety employees, nutrition staff, or anybody else working in the district will be trained with an emphasis on developing the “core five” social skills in students: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship-building skills, and responsible decision-making.

Police Chief Kelly Gordon spoke in the same vein, saying that police officers responding to incidents at schools are now very aware of how their presence can affect students. Since she took over the department just under a year ago, she has been working to ensure police are “sensitive to the learning environment” with investigations on school campuses, she said.

To help foster a more positive relationship between the community and law enforcement, the department has created a more public-friendly relationship with city families, offering Police Activities League summer camps and scholarships, as well as the “Discover Police Recruitment Experience,” which allows kids to see what it’s like being a police recruit. 

Doing More with Less

Library Services Manager Molly Wetta and Parks and Recreation Director Jill Zachary also provided an outlook on current programs offered through the city. The library has been able to continue providing a wealth of services, including library tours, class visits, reading ambassador programs, and Library on the Go events. With grant funding, the library also had a program with 16 paid teen interns, which Wetta said helped immensely with summer programming but likely won’t be able to continue without more grant money.

The city Parks and Recreation Department still offers a range of youth programs, but during the joint session it seemed that every program presented had echoes of others no longer offered, either due to logistical problems during the pandemic or from a lack of funding.

One of those funding casualties is the Summer Nights program, which just finished a stellar summer with six nights — three on the Westside, three for Eastside families — with more than 600 students attending the events. Despite the success, Zachary said there was no money set aside for Summer Nights events in 2024 or 2025, since the city was forced to make “significant budget reductions.”

Similarly, the Summer Fun program, which was founded in 2007 as a way to offer eight weeks of free summer activities for students who couldn’t otherwise afford to attend traditional summer camps, was once offered at three different schools to more than 560 students. This year, Summer Fun was offered at one location, Franklin Elementary School, to about 240 kids, and even so it was only possible because the cost is subsidized by the city, Zachary said.

Parks and Recreation also used to offer free after-school sports, paid for through the city’s general fund, which bused kids from schools to city parks for organized sports. The program went on hiatus during the pandemic, Zachary said, before it was officially snuffed out in 2023 “due to financial reasons” and the added layer of complexity in hiring coaches, staff, and transporting hundreds of children daily across town.

Opening School Space to the Public

The city used to allow the public use of school fields for recreation and organized activities. Since 2013, however, there was a transition to school principals overseeing access to the fields, which, coupled with “field maintenance concerns,” Zachary said, made it “clear that it made more sense for that to no longer be a service that the city provided.”

Now, certain fields can be rented for a fee, which varies depending on the location and type of field (turf fields for baseball/soccer cost $25 an hour for youth or $52 an hour for adults). Some campuses, she said, have organically attracted “drop-in field use” simply because there isn’t anywhere else for the public to play.

The city was nudged along by persistent community groups asking for public schools to be reopened for public use — specifically in the Westside neighborhoods — and now there is a pilot program in the works to open Harding Elementary and La Cumbre Junior High schools on the weekends.

“We’ve heard that there are not enough green spaces and the park spaces are limited on the Westside,” said Steve Venz, S.B. Unified’s chief operations officer. But there are worries about safety, with Venz saying that school staff have often returned on Mondays to find damaged property or “things that you would not want our children to be involved with,” and that opening up the campuses would require extra staff to make sure schools are ready each week.

Councilmember Oscar Gutierrez, who grew up on the Westside and attended Harding and La Cumbre, has been one of the most vocal advocates for reopening schools to the public. He was glad to see the city leadership listening to residents, and suggested that the city consider including McKinley Elementary School in the pilot program to serve the families on the Lower Westside, even if it takes him going to clean the campuses himself: “I live within walking distance of all three of those schools, so I’m willing to volunteer,” he said.

He said it was a team effort by school district and city staff, along with fellow councilmember Alejandra Gutierrez, who helped push toward the pilot program, which he sees as a city-and-county-wide program in the future.

School Boardmember Gabe Escobedo said it’s important that the Parks and Recreation department make sure people know about the program by hosting city-sponsored events to encourage people to use the now-opened spaces.

“It’s gonna take a little while to get the word out for folks that they now have access to green space on the Westside,” Escobedo said. “But if they see soccer games out there, if they see some sort of programming, that’s the easiest indication that you are welcome on this campus — come bring your kids, grab a basketball, do whatever.”