Pasadena Unified Board Halts Both Monday Meetings After Acknowledging Required Notice Was Never Properly Posted

The Pasadena Board of Education shut down both of its special meetings Monday night — one convened to define the district’s “transformation process,” the second set to take up school consolidation — after a speaker’s formal Brown Act demand exposed that the district never posted a required physical notice of the meetings where the public could see it.

The board’s own staff confirmed the failure on the record minutes after the demand letter was handed to the clerk. The board folded both meetings about 45 minutes later.

“We’ve become aware that in preparation for the meeting tonight, the notice and agenda for the meetings were appropriately posted 24 hours before the meetings on the district’s website,” Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco told the board after a recess. “However, it appears the physical copy of the notice was inadvertently not posted at a location that is freely accessible to members of the public.”

“In an effort to ensure compliance with the Brown Act, we’re concluding the Committee of the Whole meeting and we will not be proceeding with a special meeting this evening.”

The 6 p.m. Committee of the Whole was called to order at 6:02 p.m. in the Elbie J. Hickambottom Board Room at 351 S. Hudson Ave. It carried a single discussion item: continuing the board’s work to define and clarify the District Transformation Process, with the committee directed to develop a recommendation for the full board to consider and approve at a Sept. 3 special meeting.

A second special meeting was set for 8:30 p.m. the same night, which speakers said would take up consolidation options and a date for a closure vote.

The committee never took up the draft definition it had been convened to discuss. The 8:30 p.m. meeting never convened at all.

The demand

The objection came from Elizabeth McCarroll, who used her three minutes of public comment to formally challenge the legality of both meetings.

“This board has committed a clear and distinct violation of the Brown Act and Assembly Bill 2257 regarding public notice,” McCarroll said. She told the board the agendas for both meetings were digitally timestamped as posted at 9:05 p.m. Friday, Aug. 28, “well after normal business hours.”

McCarroll made a second, separate allegation: that the agendas were not merely posted late but hidden. While the district correctly posted its Aug. 13 and Sept. 10 special meetings on the main special-meetings portal, she said, the Aug. 31 meetings “were left completely off that list” and were instead “hidden inside separate calendar menu under upcoming events.”

“Under California government code, an agency cannot hide a special meeting agenda inside nested contextual menus to evade public scrutiny,” she said. “This is a textbook subterfuge posting. Because the public pathway to this agenda was obscured over the weekend, these weekend hours do not count toward a lawful 24 hour notice. You have failed to provide 24 hour notice in a location that is freely accessible and transparent to the public.”

She then told the board she was handing the clerk a formal demand to cure and correct under Government Code Section 54960.1, and demanded that the proceedings halt immediately. Any actions, votes or deliberations taken at either meeting, she said, “are legally suspect and must be declared null and void.”

“If you proceed tonight, you do so knowingly you are in violation of the law, exposing this agency to litigation, voided actions and mandatory attorney fees,” McCarroll said.

She asked that both her statement and her formal letter “be entered completely into the official minutes of tonight’s meetings.”

“I completely forgot”

Clerk Patrice Marshall McKenzie raised a point of order immediately after McCarroll’s comment and asked the superintendent whether counsel was available “to evaluate the claims that were just made and should we be seeking counsel prior to taking any further action this evening.”

Blanco said counsel was available — and indicated the district had already been in contact.

“There is counsel available, but we have already spoken with him, but I can call again to get another answer to the comment that was made,” she said.

She then invited comment from Montoya, the staff member who posts the board’s agendas.

Montoya said she published both agendas on the district’s Granicus platform Friday and immediately emailed them to a listserv. She said she did not have the exact posting time on the platform, but that the emails went out at 9:06 p.m. — “So I’m assuming that 9:05 should have been the time on Friday when I published.”

Then she confirmed the core of the allegation.

“However, I did not post the agendas outside. I completely forgot. I’m sorry,” Montoya said. “My coworker isn’t here, the person who usually works with me in the superintendent’s office and I didn’t do it. I’m sorry. So that part, yes, it is true.”

The chair cut off further discussion — “The posting’s on your website. Okay, that’s enough. We’re not going to discussion” — and, after an interjection from the audience about screenshots, issued a formal warning that continued conduct could result in removal under Government Code Section 54957.95.

Forty-five minutes of business, then a folded meeting

Public comment continued, and the board then moved to its only agenda item.

After about thirty minutes of discussion about the Committee of the Whole, the board then recessed for what the chair announced as a five-minute break, and returned about 13 minutes later to Blanco’s announcement ending the night proceedings..

The night ended with no statement on whether the cure-and-correct demand carries a response deadline, and none on what becomes of the recommendation the Committee of the Whole had been convened to produce for the Sept. 3 special meeting.