On Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025, Berkeley Unified School Board Members and officials from the City of Berkeley hosted a community meeting to discuss public safety in and around Berkeley High School and Civic Center Park. The meeting included an overview of the current situation from Berkeley City Manager Paul Buddenhagen and Berkeley Police Chief Jennifer Louis, then moved to comments from BHS students and staff and other Berkeley community members.
The safety concerns discussed at the meeting were about the unhoused encampment located at Civic Center Park, across the street from BHS. The residents of the encampment previously lived in front of Old City Hall, but were relocated to Civic Center Park after a Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024 encampment sweep by the Berkeley Police Department. Civic Center Park has been largely fenced off since Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, due to City construction plans to refurbish a fountain there. As a result, the encampment is located close to and on the sidewalks of the surrounding streets. As Civic Center Park is a location for students to eat lunch and socialize, some community members brought up the issue of less safe green space for students during the community comment.
At the meeting, Mat Glaser, a Universal Ninth Grade physics teacher at BHS, said that there is now limited green space at Civic Center Park for BHS’s student population to eat lunch and socialize.
“I hear from the kids, that’s what they want, that’s what they need, a safe space to congregate outside on grass,” Glaser said.
Other community members discussed the Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024 sweep and fencing harming both unhoused community members and BHS students.
“It’s really unfair to everybody, the whole situation, the fact that people are having to stay in that area, that there’s no other property where they can camp … and then for the high schoolers, there’s nowhere for you guys to have lunch anymore because everything’s fenced off,” said Ian Cordova Morales, President of Where Do We Go. Where Do We Go, a non-profit founded in 2019, is an organization dedicated to providing mutual aid and legal support for homeless encampments around Berkeley and Oakland.
The Old City Hall encampment was set up by the Where Do We Go Movement in protest of a policy passed in September 2024 that granted the City Manager the authority to enforce sweeps without having to provide shelter first.
“The city keeps trying to distract and take attention away from their actions. Their actions have created this area,” said Andrea Henson, the Executive Director of Where do We Go. “Folks who were in their 70s were dragging their tents across the street to Civic Center Park, where they’re at now, that’s how they all ended up there,” she said.
Morales also asked the City of Berkeley to improve living conditions for unhoused residents during the community comment.
“All we just need is the guarantee from the city that they won’t come and destroy everything, because if they came in instead and supported a community and, like, made sure everyone had trash cans and made sure there was running water in the bathrooms — man, it could be so different,” Morales said.
Another key issue raised during the meeting was student safety, especially relating to recent experiences of BHS students around Civic Center Park. On Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025, BHS Principal Juan Raygoza sent out an email to BHS students and families. “I would like to make you aware that today we received a report that an unidentified adult community member inappropriately touched a BHS student at Civic Center Park on their way to school,” Raygoza wrote.
A day later, on Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025, a suspect was found and arrested by Berkeley police officers, who in a statement on Facebook about the incident wrote that, “crimes like this affect not only the victim, but also other students and the community as a whole.”
According to Henson, the assault of the BHS Student was done by a man who did not live in the Civic Center encampment.
“The assault of the young woman was done by a gentleman who had been terrorizing women downtown for two years. He didn’t live in the encampment,” Henson said. Where Do We Go expressed concerns that the assault and the Civic Center Park encampment were falsely associated.
“We worry that in the current tense political climate, othering this community and the other ones in Berkeley and associating them with nothing but crime kind of gives the state … permission, almost for them to do harm to these communities,” said Henson.
School Resource officer Lino Guananja said, “My understanding is that he lives elsewhere in the city, however, he is known by myself and the bike patrol officers to be found and reliably is spending time within the encampment.”
Another incident brought up at the community meeting by Sara Garcia, a BHS safety officer, was an unhoused individual who entered BHS campus. Lucy Pratt, a BHS sophomore, shared that she was in her chemistry class when an unhoused individual who had managed to get inside of BHS sat down near to her.
“When Ms. Brewer tried to ask him what he was doing, he just silently sat there,” Pratt said, “It made me very uncomfortable and unsettled.”
Sergeant Brian Simon of the Berkeley Police Department spoke at the community meeting, “there were always issues, kind of around the park,” he said. According to Simon, these issues span as far back as 10 years ago. Because of Civic Center Park’s proximity to BHS, students have encountered them as well.
Morales feels the immediate one-street relocation of the encampment encapsulates the ineffective nature of sweeps. Without any permanent solution achieved, the question of how to balance public safety, student needs, and the rights of people experiencing homelessness remains heavily debated.
From the many public speakers at the community meeting, a common thread seemed to be the need for the City of Berkeley to act. To close the community meeting, Councilmember Tregub stated that copious notes were taken during public comment.
“We (City of Berkeley officials) are working night and day to figure this out, ” said Tregub.