Reinstate Barrios Unidos at Pajaro Valley High School!

A month and a half ago, Principal Todd Wilson of Pajaro Valley High School decided against renewing a contract with Barrios Unidos, a grassroots Santa Cruz organization that has long worked with incarcerated and system-impacted people, drawing wisdom and leadership from those with lived experience in struggles for social change.

When pressed by upset parents to explain why he made this terrible call, Wilson gave conflicting, inconsistent answers. What’s clear is that in a breach of protocol, he bypassed the high school’s site council in making a decision that impacts the well-being of his students. While Wilson supports having school resource officers (SROs) on his campus, despite the fact that they are actually commissioned Watsonville police officers, he has chosen to divest from Barrios Unidos, a local community organization with a proven track record of keeping low-income communities of color genuinely safe.

Few parents likely realize that in Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), SRO citations are registered on a student’s criminal record. This is how the school-to-prison pipeline is paved. A 2021 ACLU report indicates that “students who face barriers are the ones most often targeted for police intervention.” SROs, data show, disproportionately target working-class youth of color, leaving the barriers the latter face unaddressed. Schools with SROs unnecessarily ratchet up the consequences for issues and behaviors that could be addressed through more holistic, less punitive approaches. Such schools are prone to conflating tardiness, absences, poor grades, cursing, disruption, disobedience, and drug use with criminality. 

This criminalization has life-altering negative repercussions.

Barrios Unidos served as a needed community lifeline for Pajaro Valley High School’s majority Latine student population. Emerging from the Chicano civil rights struggle and antiwar movement, Barrios Unidos empowers communities targeted by state violence. Although hired on contract last year, its mentors were not outsiders.

All Barrios Unidos staff are formerly incarcerated, system-impacted, or both, and thus have organic perspectives on the challenges faced by local youth. Drawing from an Indigenous worldview and healing practices, they are dedicated to ensuring the next seven generations survive and thrive. Their mentorship is enriched by wisdom gained from living on the underside of the rock, and their strength and optimism come from having built community alternatives to systems of racism and violence.

Barrios Unidos brought community-grounded practices of safety to Pajaro Valley High School, meeting with students twice a week on campus as well as supporting them outside school by doing home visits, conducting outreach on their behalf, accompanying them to NA meetings, and showing up for them at court hearings.

Students describe Barrios Unidos as having cultivated a rare “safe space” on campus, one of the few expressive arenas not supervised by a disciplinary figure. In a recent radio interview, one student said, “We do have school counselors, but I feel like a lot of times you have to watch what you say or you feel.” Another described Barrios Unidos’s mentorship program as enabling her and others to “express ourselves without being judged.” Omar Dieguez, one of two Barrios Unidos mentors at the school, stated that students “need that space to come and express themselves, to unload a little bit of that weight that they’re carrying with them.”

This ultimately is a matter of life or death. 

We know structural violence often manifests on socially intimate registers as domestic abuse, bullying, addiction, self-harm, and suicide. When left unaddressed, the message is one of disposability for working-class youth of color. 

Maya Mendoza, who also served as a Barrios Unidos mentor at Pajaro Valley High School, observed that “a lot of the students are going through very severe emotional and mental distress, whether that be from issues that they’re personally facing or with their family or that they’re seeing in the community, anywhere from being housing insecure or getting their apartments sprayed by gangs or having to witness police violence or having to witness domestic violence in the home, being food insecure as well.”

At a recent PVUSD board meeting, the mother of a Pajaro Valley High School student pleaded with the district to reinstate Barrios. She wept while recalling her stymied efforts to convince administrators to address the bullying her child faced at school. She described calling Superintendent Heather Contreras, but never hearing back. Similarly, she conveyed her concerns to Pajaro Valley High School, but “nobody listened to me.” 

Barrios Unidos, she said, was the only place where someone heard her and helped. “The only person who defended my child was Omar [Dieguez] at Barrios Unidos,” she said. Pointing to how his mentorship led to an intervention for her child’s well-being, she stated, “Barrios Unidos needs to be in the school district. …All the schools need Barrios Unidos.”

True school safety in underresourced schools cannot be achieved through policing. It requires mentorship as a tender and tough practice – the kind of world-wise compassionate mentorship that cannot be learned from a degree-granting program but instead must be materially grounded in local community wisdom. The kind of mentorship offered by Barrios Unidos speaks to youth where they are at. It is essential to school safety and the life chances of students from historically marginalized backgrounds. 

In its half year at Pajaro Valley High School, Barrios Unidos worked with 200 youth, creating a life-giving web of relations within and beyond the school. “We were building bridges between the students [and] the teachers, the students [and] the administration, the students [and] the community, and we were putting their voice out there,” stated Dieguez. Those connections will now be broken. 

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass once stated, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Barrios Unidos is committed to both and has a powerful grassroots legacy of working with previously incarcerated men and women while also empowering youth. Carmen Perez, the director of Gathering for Justice and a mentee of Barrios Unidos’s founder Nane Alejandrez, observed that “Barrios Unidos is actually a breeding ground for leaders. A lot of us who have gone on to do work around the world have come through Barrios Unidos.”

In bringing Barrios Unidos to his school last year, Principal Wilson seemed to understand that educational institutions must serve as life-affirming spaces for students navigating social realities conditioned by systemic racism. His failure to continue the contract is a blow to some of the most vulnerable students in his school, cutting them off from support furnished by grassroots leaders with roots in Watsonville. 

Principal Wilson has made a terrible mistake by expelling Barrios Unidos from Pajaro Valley High School. According to bylaws, site councils must be involved in decisions that impact student achievement. Principals must notify the school board, enabling trustees to pose questions and make recommendations. None of this happened. 

Our district schools must be accountable to the students and communities they are meant to serve. We call on PVUSD to intervene to ensure that students at all district high schools be mentored by staff from Barrios Unidos, MILPA, and other organizations with a history of engaging youth from perspectives grounded in community wisdom.

The authors organize with Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice (PVESJ), a coalition of community organizers, teachers, ethnic studies practitioners, parents, and students who coalesced as a grassroots formation in the fight for ethnic studies in Pajaro Valley Unified School District.