The Pasadena Board of Education spent roughly two hours Thursday night line-editing a draft definition of “district transformation” and adjourned with school consolidation written in among the options, a running list of “points of contention,” no vote on the final wording of the definition and no date for one.
The special meeting, held under the banner of a ‘Committee of the Whole,’ was the board’s first completed pass at the draft, which had been scheduled for Aug. 31 before that session was halted over a notice-posting lapse.
Thursday night, Vice President Dr. Yarma Velázquez chaired; Board President Tina Fredericks and Trustee Michelle Richardson Bailey took part remotely.
Velázquez said the board would consider approval of the draft at its next meeting.
Asked by a student board member whether there was a deadline beyond Thursday for adding language, facilitator Natalia Guerra of Collaborate PASadena said, “Not that I’m aware of,” and asked when the board would return to the document. No one gave a date.
Guerra said she “single-handedly” synthesized the draft from the board’s Aug. 13 session, using some of the language Velázquez had drafted then. She said she, Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco, Fredericks and and a staff member who managed the working document, met last week to reflect on that session.
Fredericks, otherwise nearly silent on the record, made one substantive edit — a bullet at the end of the section on what the board would vote on by the end of the process: “Consolidate schools and/or establish a new school configuration to more closely align enrollment projections as an option to achieve the goals contained in this definition.”
Bailey, remote because of illness, later asked about “one of the points added by Trustee Fredericks on consolidation.” Guerra said it was “at the bottom” and that she thought Fredericks had added it, but did not read it back in her final pass; its status was unclear at adjournment.
Montoya said she would post a PDF of the document with all comments.
Consolidation stayed in three other places: Velázquez’s process language on “program realignment, co-location, consolidation, expansion and other changes,” read back without objection; the original bullet to “determine how to utilize closed campuses for revenue”; and the “considering alternatives to school consolidation” and “analyzing the impact of inaction” bullets, moved at Trustee Kimberly Kenne’s suggestion from the vote list into the process section as a “process to review and evaluate all options.”
A separate Velázquez bullet to “evaluate the educational, financial, and operational impacts of consolidation, alternatives to consolidation and maintaining the status quo” was struck as duplicative at Trustee Patrice Marshall McKenzie’s suggestion, with Velázquez’s assent.
The board also dropped a proposed reference to Assembly Bill 1912 while keeping consolidation.
Trustees also struck, for now, Trustee Scott Harden’s phrase “in the face of declining enrollment and unpredictable public funding,” which Marshall McKenzie called “a very narrow frame,” dropped the “five to 10 years” horizon and swapped “sustainable” for her “healthy and viable.”
Trustee Jennifer Hall Lee said she would not “be pushed anymore by four people on this board.”
In the meeting’s final minutes, Blanco said the process “is outlined in a resolution that the majority of the board passed” and could work alongside the board’s academic goals, which she said run through 2030.
The draft grew out of Resolution 2894, adopted June 25 over ‘no’ votes from Hall Lee, Marshall McKenzie and Bailey, and the Aug. 13 workshop.
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