PUSD Board meeting on November 21, 2019 (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
After a short meeting at 4:30 pm, and a long, closed session of over two hours, the Pasadena School Board convened to discuss, debate, and otherwise consider a plethora of subjects, many of them having to do with the closure of schools and the budget crisis at PUSD.
By Garrett Rowlan
They reopened the session with public comment that included complaints about a football coach; praise for a film about John Muir; an emotional defense of Wilson Middle School, soon to close; complaints of expensive junkets in an age of school closures; and so forth. All in all, flak coming from several sources.
Things cheered up a bit with a presentation regarding the Internship Program where Caltech, Huntington Hospital, Kaiser and many others have participated. Since 2015, 650 students in PUSD have participated in the Internship Program through eight academies in Pasadena. “It seems that half of the PUSD senior class are involved in the Internship Program,” said Larry Torres, President Board of Education. He praised the program as enabling under-represented students to escape the “bubble” of a student’s immediate environment, a somewhat rambling speech that might have been, as he stated, “long winded.”
After the approval of a resolution of inclusive schools’ week, the board moved to the approval of new middle school attendance boundaries, a step toward geographical clarity which is almost doomed from the present perspective. Open lotteries and a restive population—some forty to fifty percent of PUSD students do not attend a school in their immediate area—will make this a somewhat confusing process, even for those who are administering it.
Then came the evening’s big issue, the vote to put an 850 million dollar ballot measure up for a citywide vote on March 3, 2020. Despite a spirited presentation by Chief Facilities Officer Nelson Cayabyab, one that stressed the need to update and transform facilities—ninety percent of which were built in the 1940’s and 1950’s—it emerged that the timing wasn’t right. The lingering questions over the resized boundaries, the need for a full accountability of Measures J and I, and the need to put to productive use those school sites that will be abandoned, all these issues—the Board felt—wanted clarification or resolution before asking the public for a massive amount of money. The optics weren’t right. The Board voted to table the resolution.
As of 10:14 pm, the Board was still in session.
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