The Pasadena Unified School District’s chief executive this week called for a “shared vision” on the heels of past mistakes over the district’s efforts to stem the impact of major enrollment declines that threaten the closure of schools.
Ultimately, the message foreshadowed in Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco’s missive late Monday is that school mergers are not off the table but need collective buy-in from a community that has been wary of the process so far. It’s a discussion that will kick into high gear this Thursday in a special meeting where trustees could take action on defining “the definition for the District Transformation Process” and setting in motion.
“A shared vision will not remove disagreement or make every decision easy,” Blanco wrote. “It can give us a common destination and a way to weigh the choices in front of us. People should be able to see the information, understand the criteria, and know how their perspectives were considered, even when they reach a different conclusion.”
The transformation process had long been in the works, with a goal toward “rightsizing” the district to new economic realities, which included a $30 million budget shortfall that prompted Los Angeles County education officials to signal risks of county interventions.
But the process hit a major roadblock at the end of the last school year when efforts toward consolidating schools melted down. What had been a “consolidation framework” intended to explore mergers became mired in a fractious consolidation debate that pushed and pulled the district and its stakeholders, rocked by a series of trustee internal communications behind the scenes that would prompt a recall movement.
Together, they sparked concerns that trustees had somehow tipped the scales for merging some schools.
Trust, a vital element for school districts, fell apart.
On Monday, Blanco acknowledged the district’s shortcomings in the district’s previous go at consolidation, but she tried to rally new hope in the “transformation process” that replaced it.
“We also need to acknowledge what we learned from the recent school consolidation process,” Blanco write. “We moved into discussions about individual schools before building a shared understanding of the educational future we were trying to create. We did not always explain the information, criteria, and decision-making process clearly enough, and some people felt they were being asked to react to decisions rather than help shape the questions.”
“We can do better. This time, we will start earlier, make the facts accessible, listen across the communities we serve, and show how what we hear shapes the next steps.”
That start, in its most acute form, comes on Thursday as board trustees, before anything else, consider finalizing a basic definition of the District Transformation Process called for in Resolution 2894, which in a close vote they approved in June. That new process directed district officials to prepare local enrollment context, projected enrollment data, school site capacity reports and site staffing levels. Ultimately, the new process, if the board even decides to keep it, could still still lead to consolidation, which Blanco hinted at in her Monday missive.
All the while, some leaders, and many parents and stakeholders are wary.
Back in June, three dissenting trustees said it was not the time to jump into another transformation process and the district should instead look internally at what has caused a fracturing of community trust in district leadership.
Blanco seemed to try to quell that wariness on Monday, emphasizing transparency. She wrote that “the vision we build together will guide our students’ education for the next decade and beyond, so we have to get it right, and we can’t get it right alone. Those who will live with this change should help shape it. I am not asking for your input at the end of the process. I am inviting you to sit at the table and design this with us from the start. This plan won’t be done to or for the people it affects most.”
But whatever happens will come in yet another challenging environment. Rebuilding that trust has not been easy, and the effort comes amid an election season in which three board seats are up for grabs this November and a recall movement is in the works.
And there’s the broader enrollment context, which many district are grappling with.
While charter school enrollment in the 2025-26 school year across California has increased by nearly 27% compared to the 2015-16 school year, the total number of students enrolled in non-charter public schools has decreased by more than 11% statewide since the 2015-16 school year, according to data from the California Department of Education.
Combined, there were nearly 8% fewer students who attended all California public schools at the start of last school year (the most recently available data) than there were a decade prior. That’s a drop of almost half a million pupils.
K-12 enrollment nationwide has dropped by at least 1.4 million students since pre-pandemic highs in the 2019 school year, according to the most recent stats available from the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal government agency that collects and analyzes education data.
In this context, a move toward consolidation has gained some traction, in contrast to the wave of opponents last spring.
John Muir High School’s athletic director last month publicly warned Pasadena Unified leaders that without a consolidation strategy, the district could see more dwindling sports programs, echoing the recent cancellation of Pasadena High School’s varsity football season.
- Also see: In Pasadena, Muir High athletic director says ‘skeletal schools’ a reality amid enrollment slides
Amid enrollment declines, Director Alfredo Resendiz said that “having skeletal schools” is no longer a potential danger for the district, but a reality – a “turkey” in the coal mine.
“We’ve been coming up here to you for a while and saying this was going to happen, and here we are: fewer resources, smaller programming,” Resendiz told trustees at their board meeting on Thursday night, Sept. 24.
Economic realities were evident in Blanco’s words.
“When fewer students attend schools across the same number of campuses, it becomes harder to sustain stable staffing and equitable access to programs and services. We need to examine how we attract and retain families, strengthen the programs students need, support transitions between school levels, improve the family experience, and use our facilities and partnerships effectively.”