Budget woes and carving up the Pasadena Unified School District board into district seats dominated the discussion at Tuesday night’s joint meeting of the PUSD board and Altadena Town Council.
Outgoing PUSD superintendent Edwin Diaz told the council that there was little hope for good news in the district, budget-wise. Class sizes would remain the same, but across-the-board personnel cuts -- everyone from administrators to custodians, about 150 positions in all -- will likely be eliminated during the next school year.
“We’re down to ... every time we make a cut, it’s a person, it’s their job, it’s a family,” said Bob Harrison, PUSD board chairman.
Diaz said that, statewide, people will start to see inequities among school districts. The well-off districts that surround PUSD, like San Marino and La Canada, can ask for substantial parent donations to make up shortfalls -- “we can’t do that,” Diaz said.
The $11.1 million raised by the Pasadena Educational Foundation kept the district from having to shut down summer school, helped with the middle school program, staff development, and the Muir High school “reinvention” initiative, Diaz said, or things would be even more dire.
Diaz said that some estimates put cuts from state funding as steep as $800 per student, and there will be some districts in California that will not be able to meet their financial obligations.
PUSD is also planning to change the school board from electing members “at large” to electing to represent a particular district. The driving force behind that is the idea that, under the Fair Voting Rights Act, the “at large” system doesn’t bring aboard adequate representation of Latino voters. Harrison reminded the audience that the a district representative system for PUSD was brought before the voters in the year 2000 and narrowly defeated.
PUSD board member Renatta Cooper said that this was not a change that the board had a lot of say in. Her fear, she said, was that it would be hard to create a Latino-majority district in the Pasadena Unified area, and drawing boundaries by population would also create areas where many households put their children in private rather than public schools. But, she said, “if we decide not to move ahead with it, I’m sure we’ll be targeted by a lawsuit.”
An election to approve a districting system would cost about $500,000, which Altadena town councilmember Diane Marcussen said, in a strapped district, “half a million dollars would help a bunch of kids.”
The alternative, Harrison said, was the fear that PUSD would be sued and the court would decide the districts, in addition to paying legal fees that may be in excess of half a million dollars.
Altadena town council chairman Gino Sund said that his fear was that, in a district representative system, Altadena “woudl be effectively disenfranchised. The second thing I don’t like about it is that we work very hard to bring communities together, and this is a way to bring people apart, put people in silos.”
PUSD, the cities of Pasadena and Sierra Madre and Altadena are putting together a task force to draw district boundaries. Altadena plans to approve its appointment of two task force members by the next regular meeting on April 19. All task force members will be recommended to the PUSD board by April 26.
Sund said that anyone interested in being Altadena’s represenative to the task force should contact him at 626-794-9609 or email eugene.sund@altadenatowncouncil.org
