Leaders explore long-term funding for school safety

City, school district and police officials in Simi Valley have launched a formal working group to address a campus safety gap that left the district's 28 schools without a dedicated School Resource Officer for stretches of the current school year — and to craft a long-term funding plan before the problem repeats itself.

How a Staffing Crisis Sparked a Cross-Agency Response

For most Simi Valley parents, the alarm bells rang quietly: at some point during the 2025–26 school year, the Simi Valley Unified School District's SRO count fell to zero. According to the Simi Valley Acorn, one officer retired and another went on maternity leave, leaving all 28 campuses without a dedicated campus officer at the same time. The gap threw into sharp relief a structural problem that local officials, advocates and the Simi Valley Police Officers' Association had been flagging for years: the district's safety coverage has long depended on a very thin bench.

Prior reporting by the Acorn from 2022 shows the issue is not new. At that time, the district relied on just two SVPD officers — covering 28 campuses and, at the time, roughly 16,000 students — and the city was shouldering the full cost of those positions, estimated at approximately $160,000 per officer plus equipment, with no cost-sharing from the school district. With enrollment now reported at more than 17,000 students across those same 28 campuses, the strain on the program has only grown.

Who Is on the Working Group — and What They Will Do

The Simi Valley City Council moved first: on May 11, the council appointed Councilmembers Joseph Ayala and Mike Judge to a new interagency working group, following Ayala's suggestion to convene all stakeholders to evaluate SRO staffing and related school safety services. The Simi Valley Police Department and city staff will also participate.

The school district took its own formal vote on June 9, naming SVUSD Board Chair Dawn Smollen and Trustee Stephen Pietrolungo as its representatives, according to the Acorn's report. Both bring unusual personal context to the table: Smollen noted that her husband served as an SRO for a decade, giving her direct insight into the role. Pietrolungo is a retired principal and assistant principal in the district, with firsthand knowledge of campus operations.

The panel's mandate goes beyond simply counting officers. It will review crossing guard services and other school safety programs alongside SRO staffing, and will evaluate whether a formal cost-sharing arrangement between the city and school district is warranted — a question that previous administrations never fully resolved.

A Debate Over Numbers and Dollars

Already, the working group's two city representatives have staked out different positions on how to proceed. Councilmember Judge said he favors growth in the program, telling the Acorn, "Three is a nice number, but four would be the optimum number for SROs." Councilmember Ayala pushed back on setting a staffing target before the data is in, arguing the group should first evaluate needs and then build a comprehensive, data-driven plan with a durable funding mechanism — not a number arrived at in advance.

City Manager Samantha Argabrite told the Acorn she has been in direct conversation with SVUSD Superintendent Hani Youssef about how costs could be shared. She said the district has signaled a willingness to explore cost-sharing, and that a voter-approved sales tax measure has been discussed as one potential vehicle to fund school safety programs long term.

The Simi Valley Police Officers' Association has weighed in clearly on the side of expansion, arguing in public statements that the current structure is insufficient for a district of SVUSD's size, and that dedicated campus officers provide services — relationship-building, early intervention, specialized juvenile expertise — that patrol officers responding to calls simply cannot replicate.

What This Means for Simi Valley Families

For parents and students, the immediate practical reality is that the 2025–26 school year exposed just how precarious the existing arrangement was. A single retirement and a single parental leave erased dedicated campus law enforcement coverage district-wide. The working group is designed to prevent that from happening again by building structural redundancy into both staffing levels and funding.

The cost question looms largest over any long-term solution. The city has historically absorbed the full expense of the SRO program — a model the Acorn's earlier coverage noted was not available to districts like SVUSD through the kinds of state concentration grants that help higher-need districts elsewhere in Ventura County fund similar positions. Any new arrangement that asks taxpayers to weigh in directly — through a sales tax measure, for example — would likely require a ballot measure, meaning voters would have the final say.

The City of Simi Valley's website separately notes that officials are already examining a potential November 2026 Transient Occupancy Tax measure for other city services, suggesting that ballot-measure fatigue could factor into any decision about how to structure a school safety funding ask.

What Comes Next

The working group is expected to begin meeting in the coming weeks, the Acorn reported. Its recommendations will ultimately go before both the Simi Valley City Council and the SVUSD Board of Trustees for further deliberation. No timeline for final action has been announced.

For a community that has watched the national conversation about school safety intensify over recent years — and that lived through a zero-SRO stretch on its own campuses — the stakes of getting the funding formula right are immediate and personal. Whether the answer is a cost-sharing MOU, a new tax measure, a larger SRO corps, or some combination of all three will be up to the people now sitting in that working group.