GUEST OPINION
Pasadena Unified School District (Photo – Colorado Boulevard Newspaper)
Tina Fredericks wants Pasadena Unified families to believe that closing schools is a necessity, not a choice.
By TJ Teems
In her guest opinion, the PUSD board president argues that declining enrollment, empty seats, and financial pressures leave the district with one responsible path: “fewer schools, stronger schools.” PUSD faces serious financial and enrollment challenges. Acknowledging those challenges does not make school closures inevitable.
Before this community entrusts a board president with decisions that could permanently reshape neighborhood schools, we should ask a basic question: Do we trust the leadership making the case?
A trustee should have skin in the game
When Fredericks first ran for the PUSD board, she presented herself as a PUSD parent and public-school advocate. Today, her own children attend a charter school in Duarte.
Where a family sends its children is its right. However, it raises a legitimate question about who experiences the consequences when she asks thousands of PUSD families to accept the loss of neighborhood schools. Fredericks’ approach has placed the consolidation agenda ahead of the neighborhood-school concerns many voters expected her to represent.
Who is fighting for us?
Fredericks has sued the district over disputes involving board protocols and speech. This summer, she filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles County registrar seeking to stop circulation of a recall petition against her. Her original filing named 124 unidentified “Doe” respondents associated with the recall effort before those individuals were subsequently removed from the case.
Litigation is a legal right. But this is an extraordinary record for a sitting school board trustee, and one that makes questions about leadership, judgment and trust entirely reasonable.
What about the process?
Public-record disclosures have raised serious questions about communications among trustees and the development of consolidation proposals before the public process was fully underway.
An allegation of a Brown Act violation means that the public should not ignore credible questions about whether decisions were being shaped outside the public process.
Transparency is the foundation of public trust
When the proposed outcome is the permanent closure of public schools, that trust matters enormously.
Leadership means showing up. We expect Fredericks to attend meetings, especially special meetings she has called. It means answering parents’ questions, engaging with constituents and following the rules governing public bodies. It means not treating community opposition as an inconvenience.
When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail
Fredericks is right that PUSD cannot ignore declining enrollment, but her proposed solution of consolidation is irresponsibly narrow and short-sighted.
Where is the comprehensive enrollment strategy? Where is the district-wide marketing plan?
Where is the effort to understand why families leave PUSD and what would convince them to stay?
If enrollment is the problem, enrollment growth should be part of the solution.
Fredericks has discussed marketing primarily in the context of Transitional Kindergarten. But PUSD’s enrollment challenge is much bigger than TK.
PUSD should be aggressively marketing its strongest programs: AP, IB, dual enrollment, dual-language programs, athletics, arts, career pathways and specialized programs. It should study why families choose charter and private schools. It should develop partnerships that attract families. It should identify transportation and enrollment barriers. And it should have a real strategy for retaining the families it already has.
Most importantly, the district should be asking: What would make a family currently choosing something other than PUSD choose PUSD instead? That question is largely absent from a consolidation-first approach.
A district with declining enrollment should not simply manage decline. It should have a growth strategy
Until PUSD demonstrates that it has seriously pursued enrollment growth, stronger marketing, program development, operational efficiencies and other alternatives, asking families to surrender their schools is premature.
“Fewer schools” is not automatically a strategy for making PUSD stronger. That singular strategy, used by the PUSD board in the past, has not produced the promised outcomes.
The public deserves better than inevitability
Fredericks writes that “school consolidation is no longer a choice, but a necessity.” If closing schools truly is the only responsible option, then PUSD leadership should demonstrate that through a transparent, independently verifiable analysis comparing consolidation against every reasonable alternative, including administrative reductions, property utilization, revenue generation, enrollment strategies, program restructuring and other cost-saving measures.
That analysis should come before communities are asked to accept the loss of their schools.
PUSD families did not elect trustees to make these decisions behind closed doors and then explain why they were unavoidable. They elected them to make these decisions with the public.
Strong schools do not begin with closing schools. They begin with strong leadership.
Before PUSD closes another campus, families deserve leadership that is transparent, accountable, present, invested in public education and willing to prove that every alternative has been exhausted.
TJ Teems is a PUSD parent.
Blame it on the Pasadena community who bends over backwards to accommodate the monied demographic whose kids seldom play sports – nor would they send their little darlings to public school. This same demographic are also the landlords who have made it impossible for renting families to remain in the PUSD – hence, no players…
What a novel idea. Try to convince families with a choice to choose the PUSD, as if it hasn’t been tried in every imaginable way for the past 50 years.