American Canyon High Safe For Students, Staff: City

From The City of American Canyon: At the regularly scheduled City Council meeting on July 3, 2018, the City Council received a presentation related to the joint funding of school resource officers at the middle and high school campuses in American Canyon. The presentation gave an overview of the services provided to the campuses by the assigned school resource officers. The City Council raised questions during the presentation concerning the “total calls for service” associated to the address of American Canyon High School (ACHS), which gave the impression of a greater number of “calls” than the other high schools located in the Napa Valley Unified School District. Specific answers to the Council’s questions were not immediately available at the meeting. Witnessed by his personal visits, Police Chief Oscar Ortiz assured the Council and the community of the safe and positive environment at the ACHS campus. He also stated numerous factors that could contribute to the seemingly higher number in “calls”, and therefore, committed to conducting an in-depth analysis of the data to report to the City Council and community.

At the next public City Council meeting on July 31, 2018, the City Council received an update regarding the review of the data. The analysis concluded, as Chief Ortiz suspected, the relative number of “calls for service” from ACHS is not a statistically relevant indicator of school safety. Rather, this data set is an expression of all calls emanating within close proximity to the school – not just those originating from the school itself during normal business hours. A subset of the “total calls” data known as “case numbers” is a more relevant indicator of school safety. A comparison of the ACHS campus to other high school campuses in the District showed that ACHS had slightly lower “case numbers”.

Moreover, the analysis also found that a portion of the “total calls” were unrelated to public safety altogether. In fact, most of the calls referenced in the original July 3rd presentation were not associated to school staff or students. For example, many of the calls were directly associated to proactive traffic enforcement of Newell Drive in the proximity of the school campus. Other calls identified proactive enforcement of suspicious activity on school grounds after hours, long after students and staff left the campus for the day. Example calls unrelated to school safety include animal service calls, illegal dumping, medical calls, welfare checks, found property, and other forms of non-criminal activity.

“A comprehensive review of the data shows that ACHS is statistically just as safe, if not, safer than other Napa Valley Unified School District high schools” stated Acting Police Chief Chris Carlisle, who is covering for Chief Ortiz while he is attending the FBI National Academy until late September. American Canyon Police Department would once again like to emphasize that we are very proud of the community at ACHS; we believe it is a wonderful, inclusive, and safe campus environment. We look forward to the 2018-19 school year and our continued positive partnership with ACHS, the American Canyon Community, and Napa Valley Unified School District in our common goal of ensuring safety on and off campuses in American Canyon.

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