SANTA ROSA — The last bell at Hilliard Comstock Middle School rang Friday, ending 54 years on West Steele Lane and closing one more campus in a Santa Rosa City Schools cost-cutting drive that district leaders describe as the deepest financial reckoning in their more than 100-year history.
Comstock, which opened in January 1972 and has run about 420 students in recent years — 87% of them from low-income families — is the sixth school the district has shuttered in two years. Steele Lane Elementary closed Thursday, one day before Comstock. Santa Rosa and Herbert Slater middle schools, along with Albert Biella and Brook Hill elementaries, were closed earlier in the consolidation.
The closures trace back to a roughly $20 million shortfall in the district’s unrestricted general fund and a scramble to stay out from under a state takeover, which strips an elected board of its authority once a district can no longer pay its bills. In February 2025, trustees voted 5-1 to close Santa Rosa and Slater at the end of that school year and to give Comstock one more year before locking the gates.
This past February, the board approved about $14 million in further cuts that eliminated more than 100 positions, including entire teams of counselors and mental health staff — a move that drew sharp criticism from teachers who argued the district was pulling support from students at the exact moment it was uprooting them.
That criticism sharpened again in late May, when a divided board approved a $76,000 raise for its departing fiscal chief over objections from teachers and staff facing layoffs.
For the families still inside Comstock this week, the accounting was more personal than fiscal.
“Normally, at this time of year, we say farewell to those who are leaving or retiring or going to another school site,” said Renee Clay, a school secretary who has spent 26 of her years at Comstock. “But this year we are all going.”
The campus carries the name of Judge Hilliard Comstock, a Santa Rosa figure who commanded the city’s National Guard company on the Mexican border before World War I, trained machine gunners in France during the war and went on to a long career on the Sonoma County bench after his appointment in 1929. The school that opened in his name cost nearly $1.8 million to build.
Most Comstock students will land at Piner High School, which becomes a combined 7-12 campus in the 2026-27 school year once facilities are upgraded to handle the younger grades. Some seventh and eighth graders will instead head to Elsie Allen High School, the campus the board spared from closure and is reshaping into a project-based magnet program. District officials say special education services laid out in students’ individual plans will continue uninterrupted at the new sites.
Teachers spent the final week trying to make peace with scattering.
“We can’t all keep the band together, as much as I’d like to keep the band together,” said Devyn Shaffer, who taught English at Comstock for five years. “It’s not a building. It’s the people inside the building, it’s the people inside the classroom.”
John Lundblad, a science teacher of 16 years known for launching hot air balloons that climbed hundreds of feet while students cheered, said he expects the move to work out. “I think it’s going to be very good for the kids,” he said.
The students were blunter.
“I’m kind of sad that it is closing because it’s a great school,” said seventh grader Nyeli Alvarez. “It’s got great teachers, they help you with a lot of stuff.”
What happens to the Comstock campus itself remains unsettled. The district has said it will run a separate process, beginning this year, to decide whether to lease or sell its closed sites to other agencies, businesses or local governments — a decision an advisory committee is expected to weigh.
For now, the building empties out. Head custodian David Munoz, who is transferring to Maria Carrillo High School, summed up the place he is leaving the way the people who worked there tended to.
“It’s a good school,” he said. “The teachers are nice.”
Roger Coryell is a reporter for Wine Country Daily, covering Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino and Napa counties.