photo credit: City of Sebastopol
Former Sebastopol city manager Don Schwartz.

What's happening in Sebastopol?

For the latest in our partnership with the Sebastopol Times,

KRCB's Noah Abrams talks with the reporter and editor Laura Hagar Rush.

Noah Abrams: All right, Laura Hagar Rush, welcome back to KRCB. It's so good to have you here again.

So, the dismissal, if we'll call it that, or the departure of Sebastopol city manager Don Schwartz, that seems to be the top of ticket item as far as news in Sebastopol.

Laura Hagar Rush: Absolutely. That was a huge shock to a lot of people in town.

The city council at the end late night after 10:30 at night, they went into closed session and and voted three to two to how did they put it? Release for no cause. It was vague.

There are some issues with it. For example, [Schwartz is] in the middle of a three-year contract and it's going to cost the city about $220,000 to let him out of that contract.

That includes severance and then also the cost of finding and re-hiring a new city manager.

Noah Abrams: Has there been any sort of clues as to why this dismissal happened?

Laura Hagar Rush: There are no clues. The city is simply saying, you know, we can't talk about personnel issues. All the city council people were under closed session. They're not allowed to talk about personnel issues either. A lot of people in the town are very worried, I would say. Don seemed to be a really stabilizing presence in the city in terms of really sort of at least running the council, or at least running the city government, [with] kind of extreme sort of levels of professionalism.

So, we don't exactly know what's going to happen. And a lot of people are pretty angry about it, frankly.

Noah Abrams: A really surprising situation to say the least. Should we talk about Analy's new cell phone policy in classrooms?

Laura Hagar Rush: Absolutely. So, back in September 2024, Governor Newsom signed a phone free school act. That gave all schools in California until 2026 to basically ban cell phones from classrooms.

Our local principal at Analy, Chuck Wade, decided he didn't want to wait that long and actually he'd been getting a lot of pressure from some of the teachers to move faster on this.

Basically the policy is pretty simple, it's just that cell phones are allowed on campus, but must be turned off and put away during class time; and it's kind of up to the teacher about how that's enforced. Some teachers just require that students put their phone in their backpacks and zip up the backpack.

Others actually have little drop off either boxes, wooden boxes on their desk where students drop their phones when they come in, or they even use like those hanging shoe, those plastic hanging shoe things. Analy already had a cell phone policy in place that was basically this. They tightened it up slightly, like I think for the second infraction, they made the punishment a little more serious...But the idea is they're going to enforce it more.

So, I talked to John Grech, who's an Analy history teacher, about this. He is really happy about this. He says that he has seen really a dramatic downturn in reading ability for his students; you can see it in the test scores obviously, but you can also he says see it in day-to-day classroom work. He says if he tries to assign even like three or four paragraphs, he gets push back. And he says it's not [because] they can't read, it's that they don't want to.They don't like it.

He's a veteran teacher. He's been teaching for 28 years. This is super concerning to him and he's hoping that this ban will go some way towards reversing that problem.

Noah Abrams: If you have anything else to say on that one, go for it, but otherwise, happy to move on to what's happening at Ives Park. I think anybody who's spent enough time around Sebastopol knows and loves the feeling of going to Peace Town and hanging out on the Ives Park lawn, but it can be a little funny the way it's bifurcated there by that concrete channel of a creek bed, with the one or two little bridges. So, it seems like that might be subject to change.

Laura Hagar Rush: So, a very interesting thing is happening with Ives' Park right now and in particular with Calder Creek. There's a group called the California Urban Streams Partnership that several years ago proposed a very extensive day lighting of Calder Creek through Ives Park under High Street, opening the creek basically across Main Street, across Petaluma Avenue and into the Laguna.

They're now ready to do phase one of that. So they basically want to break apart the channel and naturalize the creek from like High Street up to what's called the Weir or what used to be the little pond area. This has caused some controversy interestingly. I mean, almost everyone in Sebastopol is in favor of a naturalized and open creek. They're so beautiful. How could they not be?

The problem is there's another group called Friends of Ives Park, who I should say are all also sort of well-known local environmentalists. They are kind of grudgingly supportive of phase one of opening the creek, but their concern is phase two would open the creek from the middle of Ives Park up to Jewel [Avenue], right?

And it would just basically wipe out about 50% of the event space. And so people who are very committed to the use of Ives Park for sort of community activities like Peace Town are worried that that really won't be so possible with this kind of big big creek restoration and naturalization.

Lawrence Jaffe of the Grange said when I spoke to him, "Mrs. Ives donated a park, not a creek." Which is interesting [because] he's a really a lifelong environmentalist, but he cares about keeping the event area a big communal space for Sebastopol to sort of have its celebrations in.

Noah Abrams: It is true, friends can have disagreements. It'll be interesting to see how far or how that project advances.

Events coming up, I think there's a couple fun ones you want to tell us about?

Laura Hagar Rush: Super fun ones. So, this weekend, there is the Apple Blossom Parade and Festival, also in Ives Park. And I have one more thing that I want to tell you about, which is the police chief, Sean McDonagh, was just sworn in. He announced sort of several plans and one of them that I thought was super fun was that he wants to have like a mounted volunteer unit, like a equestrian unit for the police force made up of like, you know, police volunteers, which I thought was fascinating.

One of the reasons he wanted to do that was as he talked to people in the police station, he realized that a lot of them were horseback riders, and that gave him this idea and he thought it really matched the kind of rural quality of Sebastopol.

Noah Abrams: Well, we'll see if we see them out there at the Apple Blossom Parade. Laura Hagar Rush, thanks so much for speaking with us again.

Laura Hagar Rush: Thanks Noah.