GUEST OPINION
Patrick Cahalan (Photo courtesy of author)
The opening line on the web site for the “No on EE and R” campaign is one every resident of PUSD has seen before: “We all want an effective public education system for our children and support greater funding to get there.”
By Pat Cahalan, PUSD Trustee
Long-time actual supporters of public education in Pasadena, Sierra Madre, and Altadena can predict the argument that is about to unfold.
Their argument can be summed up as, “We don’t object to greater funding, because we know that greater funding is needed to get better results, but we can’t give you the funding until you get the better results”. The argument has always been circular. It has been the objection to increasing funding public education since the passage of Prop 13 in 1978, when the state of California halved funding for public education essentially overnight.
This is a state of affairs that we’ve only marginally addressed in the years since. In 2024, California ranked behind New York, D.C., New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Alaska, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wyoming, Hawaii, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Washington, and North Dakota in absolute dollars of per pupil funding.
Hardly a collection of “overspending big government liberal states” as far as the national narrative goes, is it?
Moreover, that ranking is only in absolute dollars spent. Education is primarily a function of labor cost, which is highly impacted by local cost of living. In Montana, the $11,983 they spend per-pupil hires a lot more educators per dollar than the $13,642 we spend in California, because the cost of living in Montana is 77% of California’s – you can pay teachers less in dollars and they can still have more disposable income. Correcting for local CPI, wages, and median taxpayer income, Montana actually spends roughly $1,400 more per pupil than California does. The national narrative is that Texas woefully underfunds public education – and they do – but their $9,871 per pupil is also $400 more than California’s when adjusted for local indices (Texas cost of living is just a shade over 69% of California’s). California being allegedly “big government” is a national (and local!) narrative that’s remarkably impenetrable to data-driven arguments.
It is no secret that with the expiration of supplemental federal ESSR and state pandemic funding, school districts up and down the state of California are struggling to preserve services. Our students still need additional supports to recover from the impacts remote schooling and pandemic struggles put on their academic careers. Measure EE, the parcel tax, seeks to plug part of the gap between the district’s expenditures and the funding coming from the state and federal government. Should it pass, it will enable the district to preserve some critical services. We will still have to continue the budget reduction task the Superintendent’s Budget Advisory Committee has been engaged with for months, but the reductions will be much more manageable.
There are additional criticisms out in the public, of course. “I support greater funding for public education as soon as the Board of Education agrees with me and my understanding of priorities” is circular, much like the better results argument above, and absolves the citizenry of its complicity in abandoning public education in the first place.
The Board of Education is a group of people who have to work together to make decisions. I was not elected as Mayor of Education, and neither is any other member of the Board. The perspectives of seven different people in collective decision-making resulting in compromise and a common vision is a feature, not a bug.
I will say that in my almost-decade of talking to board members up and down the state of California, in rural and urban districts, a pervasive theme is “making the best decision you can make with limited resources”. Any business or organizational leader can tell you this often leads to making less optimal long-term decisions to solve shorter term problems.
The obvious solution to this is not to starve the system of yet more resources, but to increase funding to make the better solutions viable in the first place.
Anyone who has ever had to do home improvement on a home understands this dilemma quite well: for some problems, one solution might get you through three years, and another will get you through thirty. If the thirty-year fix is three times your budget… your choices are limited to fixing it for three. And hope it doesn’t entirely give out.
Staff Housing
One of the additional criticisms of the proposed bond is that there’s language in the bond proposal that supports using bond money for staff housing projects. The argument goes something along the lines that “the school district shouldn’t be a landlord”, or “the money should be spent on schools”.
I’m a very strong supporter of this proposal. I specifically argued to include the language for this use in Measure O and wanted to spend more Measure O money on this purpose.
Anyone who watches actual school board meetings would know that the board is in heavy agreement that the property management tasks for such a project would be outsourced to a domain expert. The cost of living in Pasadena is simply too high for most district employees to pay.
One of the reasons why the project is being considered in the first place is because recent changes in state law mean that school districts can pursue these projects at a substantially reduced load of red tape. In practical terms, due to those changes, the district can actually build the staff housing faster and cheaper by using its own capital than the project could be built if we simply sold the land to a developer.
Essentially, the district has an opportunity to turn what is an ongoing liability taking funds away from routine maintenance – the maintenance cost of an underutilized school site – into an ongoing revenue stream, while also providing much needed housing to our staff that cannot afford to live in Pasadena. This is a decision that almost any business would regard as an absolute win-win. This is a decision that’s been quite vocally supported by every housing advocacy group in the city.
I could go on for several thousand more words, but the last point I’d like to address is that passing a bond measure does not translate into an immediate corresponding increase in property taxes, which is an argument implicitly made over and over again under the guise of “cost to the taxpayer”.
Bond measures authorize the board to issue bonds over time, and there are various systemic controls in place to encourage fiscally responsible use of bond authority.
Currently, the Measure O bond authority is not fully expended, and there are more bonds to be issued before the district reaches the cap authorized by Measure O. It will be years before the district completes Measure O, as a bond package, and begins to rely on Measure R authorization to issue more bonds.
The reason the Board of Education is seeking this authorization now is that the overall district facilities require significantly more, in the way of net repairs and upgrades, than Measure O provides. I need to stress that this is not new or surprising news. The decision to put Measure O on the ballot now and for the dollar value it was settled on was a matter of weighing a number of factors, including the impact to the taxpayer over time and the likelihood that the measure would pass, and those played into the amount that we asked for back in 2020. Like Measure TT before it, and Measure Y before that, and virtually every bond measure, Measure O is not going to fix all of our facility needs.
I hope you can join me in investing in the public school project with your vote in November. It is, all other circular arguments aside, what is best for the kids.
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