At a June Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education meeting in the wake of a failed effort to consolidate schools, trustees, weary from weeks of controversy and pushback over a process that many felt was unfair, reflected on what went wrong.
They centered on the theme of trust. A broken trust.
“I always say that trust is always rebuilt at the dais first,” Trustee Jennifer Hall Lee said at the meeting, amid an array of conciliatory words from trustees. “We can’t expect people out in the community to trust us if we don’t trust each other. That’s where our work has to start.”
Hall Lee’s words echoed after a fractious consolidation debate 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.
It was the end of a challenging school year for the district, where leaders had pledged to rebuild confidence in the district’s processes that had frayed in recent months, with shaken faith in the school board and also in the district’s central office.
Fast forward a few months.
District leaders, parents and other stakeholders enter the new school year, which begins Monday, Aug. 17, still reeling from last year’s tumult. Questions loom over how the district is going to “transform” itself in an era of declining enrollment, and thus revenues, while also rebuilding a trust that took a hard hit last year and into the summer.
There’s hope in a good year, and in ways to rebuild fractured faith, but it’s mixed with caution and scrutiny as a new school year ramps up, a recall drive gets going, and with an election in November.
You could hear the scrutiny on Thursday night, as parents chimed in at the district’s first meeting before the new school year.
“If you wanted to rebuild community trust, this isn’t it,” said parent Ashley Lincoln, as a revived consolidation effort was back in front of trustees. “… This is not the time for this. It is time to listen to your constituents, focus on your students and families who have returned for the school year, the facilities you have now, and rebuilding the community’s trust.”
Trust hit #1: The consolidation episode
The context, even before the consolidation debate, didn’t help matters.
Public school districts rely largely on enrollment, and by extension average daily attendance, to fund a significant portion of their coffers. More than a decade of declining enrollment already had PUSD leaders concerned, before the Eaton fire tore through its community’s neighborhoods and schools.
Parents left frustrated by the district’s response to the disaster or rounds of program cuts and layoffs in the last two years warned of moving their children out of the district.
And then came the consolidation debate.
Months of angst within the community about the potential for beloved schools to be closing and frustration with the trustee-approved process to explore mergers reached a fever pitch in May with the release of public records that revealed internal communications between a portion of the Board of Education.
The texts and emails appeared to show some trustees coordinating plans for consolidation prior to the public process beginning. Trustees included in the records said the conversations were taken out of context and assured the public the process was aboveboard.
It was the final straw for an already teetering process.
At the next consolidation advisory committee meeting, where a vote on consolidation options was due to take place, committee members and attendees said they felt the entire process had been a sham and that it could not continue.
Board President Tina Fredericks and Trustee Scott Harden both received notices of intent to recall during the contentious May 28 meeting. The notices were submitted to the Los Angeles County election office, which on Thursday approved the recall petitions.
A district legal analysis concluded no “unlawful meetings” took place, and that the communications among board members was not a quorum, which would have violated state open meetings laws. Fredericks herself said this week in an “Open Letter to the Pasadena Unified School District Community,” that she’s always had “open dialogue with members of the community.”
But the internal communications were a breaking point for Dawn Denison, a recall organizer.
“At that point the trust is so broken that there’s no pretending that you’re working for your constituents,” Denison said.
In addition, trustees Kim Kenne, Patrice Marshall McKenzie and Bailey are up for election this November. The District 7 seat is also up for election, but incumbent Trustee Yarma Velázquez has announced she will not be seeking reelection.
“I’ve never said we might not need to close schools,” Denison said. “I said it needs to be happening in a slower, more thoughtful, much more public, transparent process.”
Ultimately, the advisory committee voted to not recommend any of the merger scenarios that had been presented. When those recommendations came before the board, trustees voted to not move forward with the rest of the merger exploration process.
Trust hit #2: District trees removal saga
The morning after that board vote, district officials held a virtual press conference announcing a soil remediation plan to address sites contaminated post-Eaton fire. Within the plan — its urgency catalyzed by the need to get the project done during the summer break — was the need to remove about 200 trees across several district properties.
“This is really a restoration project for the health and safety of our children after the fire and we hope that you could help us frame it that way,” Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco said to the assembled media members.
Almost immediately, local environmental advocates pushed back against the plan and the characterization from the district that it had been mandated by the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) to take down trees.
What has followed has been a continuous back-and-forth between the district, members of the public, DTSC, and most recently, the city of Pasadena, which reversed its initial stance and said the city’s tree protection ordinance applies to this work.
PUSD sued to prevent the city’s tree protection ordinance from blocking soil remediation work. A judge issued an order preventing the city from enforcing or issuing stop work orders and said its tree protection ordinance could not be applied to the district’s work.
Lauren Siegle, a member of Pasadena’s Environmental Advisory Commission, spoke during the board’s Thursday night, July 16, meeting about the potential consequences of the district’s latest controversy.
Once again, the issue of trust in the district underpinned the new scrutiny.
She called the district’s actions embarrassing and said the Pasadena Educational Foundation has been receiving complaints and questions from donors and sponsors about the ongoing tree situation.
“Because they don’t trust you guys anymore,” Siegle said. “So you’re going to lose money and faith. Is that what you want?”
District leaders urged the community to allow it to complete its work before the new school year begins to avoid parts of campuses remaining closed when students returned. Community members have tied themselves to trees or climbed into their branches to stop the removals and bring awareness to the issue.
About 115 trees were removed, but advocates and city intervention succeeded in preventing all the work from being completed before the start of the school year.
Some parts of campus marked for work will remain closed off into the new school year until the work can be resumed.
A visit from Julia “Butterfly” Hill, a renowned environmental activist and famous tree sitter brought more unwanted attention to the district’s remediation plan.
The trust factor. Why it matters
A commentary last year from the Brookings Institution highlighted the importance of trust in education systems.
It focused on a concept called “relational trust” – a key factor, the authors said, in creating strong family, school and community partnerships, and a key catalyst for encouraging stronger student test scores. The paper pointed to several “layers” of that trust, ranging from competence to integrity.
“To achieve a shared vision, education system actors must act with integrity and follow promises through with action,” the paper noted.
But trust can be elusive, when perceptions arise that a given process has not been fair, said Julie Marsh, a professor of education policy at USC, who studies school districts and boards of education.
Marsh has found that oftentimes the controversy is less about what the decision was and more how the decision is made.
“Communities are often willing to accept really difficult decisions, like school closures or consolidations, if they believe that leaders really handled it with transparency and looking at multiple perspectives, explaining their evidence,” Marsh said.
Disagreement is not bad in itself, Marsh noted. It’s just that stakeholders want to know that all sides are heard, with evidence presented for each, and that it was done with transparency.
“When those things are seen as being breached, then I do think there’s a whole cascading of things we might see,” Marsh said.
Impacts of such a breach, Marsh said, could be seen in parents’ investment in attending meetings, volunteering or voters’ willingness to support for bond measures.
Healing the ‘fracture’
Leaders spent the summer setting the table for a discussion on rebuilding fractured trust from the consolidation debate.
Harden said at that June 25 meeting that future work on reshaping the district would be a chance to start rebuilding public trust.
McKenzie described the “fracture of public trust” as looming large over the community.
“Our first obligation to the public is to repair that trust, full stop,” McKenzie said. “We need to spend internal work together going through that process.”
On Thursday night, it remerged yet again, but this time in the context of a discussion that dug deeper into how trustees define trust.
The consolidation issue, after some thought it was off the table at the end of the last school year, was back on the table, just as the district was entering a new year.
Trustees came off the dais, and sat gathered around a table as the public looked on in a discussion facilitated by Natalia Guerra, director of community partnerships and impact at Collaborate PASadena,
The board spent the meeting discussing what a committee working on consolidation should consist of and identifying goals for a new “district transformation” process. But against major public pushback, reminiscent of last June, they ultimately tabled consideration of a revived school consolidation plan, and the transformation.
Still, trustees tapped into something that had to come first.
They agreed they needed to establish public trust, define what it means for this district, and who to engage in that trust. As she navigated an array of Post-it notes and action-item mark-ups on a nearby giant white board, Guerra suggested a potential goal of working toward building a “trust framework,”
“If we are word-smithing what trust means, then we’ve got a big problem,” Hall Lee told her colleagues. “Trust is the firm belief that someone or some thing is honest, safe and reliable. Maybe we need to start there as a board conversation of what are we trustworthy to the community. I mean, we are educating their children.”
Trustees Bailey and McKenzie, echoed Lee, arguing that the board needed to regain the community’s trust before engaging in a transformation process.
“We need our own transformation,” Bailey said of the board. “We need to transform this board. We need to adjust and repair our own culture before we can even begin to even think about being effective engaging the community.”
Not all public scrutiny has been on the board.
Molly Dodge, a parent of two children, said her trust in the district’s central office and Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco broke during the saga that followed the Eaton fire for the Altadena Arts Magnet community.
The lack of transparency and mishandling of cleaning up and properly testing the campus led Dodge to moving her youngest child out of PUSD and to another district, she said. However, her oldest will be attending Eliot Arts Magnet this school year.
“I would like to see central office and the superintendent show up with better transparency and compassion and positivity for what lies ahead,” Dodge said.
She’s concerned that district leadership won’t make the difficult but necessary decision to right-size the district through consolidation. Dodge has her focus on Blanco and the leadership team more than the Board of Education.
It’s still Blanco who “decides how things are accomplished,” she said.
“Just changing an individual without changing perhaps the practices in the organization or the institution wouldn’t necessarily solve things,” Marsh said.
Still, trust can be rebuilt over time, she added, but it relies on accountability for problems in a district, being transparent around decisions, being responsive to community members concerns in even small ways, and building back social ties with a community.
On the public’s side, Marsh said community members might also consider the challenges board members are facing.
“I also think there’s a lot of members who are really just thinking of this as public service and then are overwhelmed by what the job really is,” Marsh said.
A report published earlier this year by the Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-authored by Marsh looked the at the modern context facing board of education members.
It found that school board members statewide feel they do not receive enough support and training about how to navigate conflict and how to interpret and use data to inform decisions.
About half of the board members surveyed were unsure whether they’d be running for another term in office and said they had felt serving on a school board had been more politically challenging than expected.
The future
As the summer break winds down and students return to campus this week, the theme of trust is not lost on other stakeholders in the district, including students themselves.
At a recent Board of Education meeting, Student Board Member Yul Hur and one of the district’s lead gardeners Erik Martinez both cited how difficult rebuilding trust can be once broken.
Martinez focused on the budget cuts from last school year impacting the number of people able to maintain campus green spaces and that they are already falling behind because of a lack of person power.
“Once a district gains a reputation of neglect, rebuilding that trust takes years and costs far more than preserving it in the first place,” Martinez said.
A few minutes later Hur referenced the controversies of the last year and the need for the student leadership voice to be a larger part of discussion moving forward.
“We hope that the district’s ensuing actions can work towards repairing community trust after it has been broken repeatedly over the last year,” Hur said.
Staff Writer Ryan Carter and correspondent Sam Mulick contributed to this story.