Heather Knight, The San Francisco Chronicle
At 5 feet tall and 105 pounds, she’s smaller than many of the students she works with, but she has a personality so big some of her colleagues call her “a human tornado.” She grew up in a poor family in the Mission District and didn’t trust the police in the neighborhood, but now she’s an officer herself. She had a baby when she was 14 and now tries to persuade other 14- year-olds to hold on to their childhood longer than she did.
The portrait of Officer Lucy Clemons, 42, may seem unlikely, but many students, teachers and counselors at Visitacion Valley Middle School consider it just about picture perfect.
As one of the San Francisco Police Department’s 26 school resource officers,
Clemons has come into the public spotlight in recent weeks as the school board debated the officers’ role. Officers are assigned full time at 17 high schools and five middle schools, and part time at four other schools.
Meetings to discuss the issue were filled with people. Some told the board the police officers were dragging kids out of classrooms to arrest them, were threatening and intimidating to students and caused more problems than they solved. Others said the officers had become part of each school’s family, calming fights between kids, helping teachers keep their classrooms safe and becoming mentors and tutors at the same time.
At Visitacion Valley, administrators, teachers and students alike said Clemons fits the the latter picture. At the Leadership class she helps run -- which chronically truant students can choose as their elective -- eighth- graders Thursday discussed the role she’s played in their lives since arriving at the campus two years ago.
Daniella Pinzon, 14, said she had rarely come to school before Clemons showed up, but she now comes every day. If she’s going to be late, she makes sure to call the school to let them know. Her GPA has shot up from 0.67 to 3.0 in two years.
“When I have problems, I go to her. I don’t have anybody else to go to,” Daniella said. “I’d feel uncomfortable without her.”
Clemons found Cal Glenn, now 14, hiding behind trees near the school. The then-sixth-grader kept going to school -- almost. Struggling with family problems, he couldn’t bring himself to actually go into school each day.
“I was bored, and I didn’t feel like coming,” he said.
Clemons began calling his house and chatting with his grandmother about Cal’s problems. With their urging, he agreed to go to school and now shows up almost every day. He plays point guard on the basketball team and worked hard to maintain a 2.33 grade point average during the season so he could stay on the team. He just cut his first rap CD and sold 80 copies to teachers, students, and, of course, Clemons.
“If I have any problems, I can talk to her,” Cal said. “She’ll talk to me and say, ‘I’ll see what I can to do help you out and make it better.”’
Now, he says, he only gets in trouble “if I deserve it.” Sometimes, he has to serve detention or clean up the school yard. He hopes Clemons’ role remains the same even after he’s off at high school next year, he said.
“When people see her, they probably think she’s bad,” he said. “But when they meet her, they think she’s cool. We need her to keep our school safe.”
Clemons has arrested a handful of students for assault, robbery and battery,
she said, but has usually worked with the kids several times before the ultimate arrest. She said she had handcuffed one kid at school because he became so violent he was a danger to himself.
Despite Clemons’ praises, the school resource officer program, started in 1999 when the city won a federal grant for keeping schools safe, has been criticized by some students such as Yamini Bhatnagar, a senior at Leadership High who said, “Having cops on campus is really intimidating.”
And the program has come under the school board’s scrutiny a few times. In 1999, the board asked the Police Department to restrict the campus officers from carrying guns, but it later backed down. Some blamed school resource officers for the October brawl at Thurgood Marshall High School.
Most recently, the board Tuesday night voted unanimously to renegotiate some of the program’s details with the Police Department.
They want each school site to have more individual control, students to not be arrested on campus for crimes committed off-campus and a committee to be established to hear grievances from parents and students. Perhaps most notably,
the board wants officers to be assigned mainly to keep intruders out, rather than working with troubled students inside the school. Some board members objected to the officers playing a counselor-like role.
“I’m not a counselor by any means, but I have an ear,” Clemons said. “Sometimes that’s all the kids need.”
“My primary goal for the kids here is to teach them how to get help, how to problem-solve without resorting to violence,” said Clemons, who commutes from San Jose so she can be near her daughter, who has cerebral palsy. “When the kids get out of control, they don’t see me as the enemy. They see me as help. They know that’s the time to chill, and they do.”
But some students are not comfortable with the officers in their schools. They would prefer the money be spent on counselors.
“There’s a relationship you can build with a counselor,” said one student at Tuesday night’s board meeting. That feeling was reflected on the stickers some students wore saying, "$1 million for counselors, not cops!”
On Wednesday, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, school board President Emilio Cruz and San Francisco Deputy Police Chief David Robinson held a news conference to reinforce their support of the school resource officer program and to clarify the resolution. Ackerman stressed the importance of allowing each school’s students, parents and staff to determine what role -- if any -- the officers would play.
At Visitacion Valley, Principal James Dierke is happy with the role Clemons plays.
Her leadership classes have helped raise attendance levels. She staffs the school’s anonymous hot line and hands out cards listing some of the city’s social services and their phone numbers. She gives assemblies on intimidation, bullying and respect. She helps run the school’s peer court, in which students decide the punishments of others, rather than sending kids directly into the justice system.
But mostly, Dierke said, she has “kept the place safe and sane.”