PUSD-Town Council Meeting Recap: Budget Cuts, Redistricting

The Pasadena Unified School District Board held a joint meeting with the Altadena Town Council on Tuesday to discuss an upcoming as well as that the district could face next year.

School district officials are looking into moving from the current at-large election districts where everybody votes for every board member to a vote for their one member.

That could mean that Altadena voters could be divided into separate districts without constituting a majority in any one district, by Altadena Town Council chair Gino Sund at last month's Town Council meeting.

Most of the discussion at the meeting regarding the those subjects have previously been discussed at PUSD board meetings and elsewhere, but here are some of the highlights from the meeting.

• PUSD Superintendent Edwin Diaz laid out the scenarios for the budget cuts, which are listed in three categories.  The most severe (Category III) cuts would include massive reductions to custodial staff and several academic programs that Diaz credited with improving the district in the last few years.  Diaz said he expected to have to do the Category I and II cuts, and said that the Category III cuts would be done in the event that the state reduces per pupil spending by $330 or more.  Diaz said that some budget estimates have reductions at $800 per pupil.
• Altadena Town Council member Allan Wasserman noted that $11.4 million is not really that much for a community like Pasadena and Altadena (he described it as "chump change") and asked Diaz if raising money through the business community is a possibility.  Diaz noted that the district has already received about $11 million in donations through the Pasadena Educational Foundation, and would be facing much deeper cuts without them.
• Town Council members did not provide any further discussion of who will serve on the committee that will handle the redistricting process.  The Town Council will make recommendations for two Altadena residents to sit on the nine-person committee.  County Supervisor Michael Antonovich is responsible for making the appointments.  Town Council Chair Gino Sund did say that nobody has stepped up and shown a lot of enthusiasm for serving on the committee.
• Several PUSD board members said, as they have in the past, that they are going forward with the redistricting process for fear of being sued for not complying with the California Voter Rights Act.  Board member Renatta Cooper said that the issue has been with an interpretation of the law that Latinos are being underrepresented in at-large election systems like PUSD's.  She also said that there is a specific group that is targeting PUSD for a lawsuit if the district does not go forward with the process.
• Diaz said that PUSD consultants have looked at whether the district office should be reduced even further as part of the cuts (district staff fall in the Category I and II cut sections) but said that the consultants recommended adding office staff.
• Diaz noted, as we have on Altadena Patch in , that despite having relatively high income levels in the PUSD district overall, the district has one of the higher rates of low-income students in the county, and is not at all comparable to school districts in some neighboring cities like La Canada Flintridge and San Marino.
• Alice Petrossian, the district's Chief Academic Officer, mentioned various partnerships between Altadena organizations and the district.  Two examples: the Altadena Rotary has been offering $300 "mini grants" to Altadena teachers looking to do special programs for students.  She also mentioned that the 5 Acres foster care youth program has a tutoring program that partners with Loma Alta Elementary.