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Parents and teachers urge Beaumont Unified to rethink SRO spending, suicide-prevention protocols
Summary
During public comment, a district teacher and a community member urged the Beaumont Unified board to add detailed contract language for TK/k teachers and to reconsider using LCAP funds for school resource officers while improving suicide-prevention training and community engagement.
At the June 9 Beaumont Unified board meeting, public commenters urged the board to strengthen contract language for transitional kindergarten and kindergarten teachers and to reconsider the district’s use of LCAP supplemental and concentration dollars to fund law enforcement on campuses.
"When teachers bring you that, it is data, not greed," said Hannah Edmonson, a Beaumont Unified teacher, urging trustees to adopt specific contract language for shared TK/K classrooms, collaboration time, parent-conference space and duties such as toileting that she said cannot be left to vague ‘‘other duties.’’ She asked the board to refer to the Beaumont Teachers Association’s TKK proposal and called for proactive contract language to protect students, families and teachers.
Sonia Colchado, who identified herself as a community member involved with parent advisory committees and the LCAP process, asked the board to revise its suicide-prevention policies sooner than the five-year minimum review cycle when community concerns warrant earlier review. She questioned whether SROs are trained in crisis intervention and said she found what she described as a $577,000 LCAP SNC expenditure for law enforcement; she also said the SRO memorandum of understanding she located with Beaumont PD expired in 2023. "So please reevaluate that," Colchado said, urging the district to redirect funds toward behavioral-health therapists and to solicit community feedback.
Board member David Sanchez acknowledged the comment and asked administration for follow-up, saying he hopes an incident that was described as a student being held in a police vehicle was not a district pattern and requested a briefing memo for clarification.
The public comment period followed board rules limiting individual speakers to three minutes and total public input on an item to 20 minutes. Trustees did not take immediate action on the requests but recorded the comments and directed staff to follow up where appropriate.
