Pasadena Unified School District Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco and fellow district leaders Wednesday, Nov. 5, told a virtual audience of parents, teachers and other stakeholders that work continues in identifying where the district can cut $30 million to $35 million needed to address an ongoing structural deficit.
Ahead of a key Board of Education meeting next week on the district’s troubled finances, the PUSD held a virtual town hall, where leaders presented updates on the fiscal stabilization process and how eight different workstreams have been set in motion to help identify necessary and deep cuts.
“With every crisis comes an opportunity,” Blanco said to open the town hall. “It’s a opportunity to reimagine, reinvent and do some transformation and not look at this as something that is going to pull us down because we have been stronger together.”
The workstreams include the Superintendent’s Budget Advisory Committee, central office reductions, contracts, grant maximization, special education, transportation, asset management and staffing to ratio/vacancies.
The committee, made up of teachers, school staff, principals, administrators, parents, students and local residents, convened in September and October tackling reductions to school-based services. It held its last meeting on Oct. 29 and resulted in a ranked priority list of potential reductions that will be ultimately voted on by the Board of Education.
Members ranked different sets of school based services on a scale from 0 to 4 with lower number for those most easiest to reduce and higher numbers for those services that would be most difficult to cut.
Included in the list of potential cuts are elimination of 25% of athletics budget by site; reduction of community assistants at middle schools and elementaries with low unduplicated pupil count; elimination of 4.75 full-time positions to arts/K-2 music reduced to bi-weekly and reduce custodial at secondary by one per site.
PUSD finds itself in a fiscal predicament thanks to a structural deficit that is the result of deficit spending, declining enrollment, rising costs, the expiration of one-time COVID-19 relief dollars and uncertainty in state and federal funding.
It is because of this financial situation that the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) required PUSD to submit an updated fiscal stabilization plan by Dec. 6. LACOE officials delivered a message of warning in-person at a Board of Education meeting last month.
Blanco said Wednesday that in the seven other workstreams, a total of $5 million to $10 million in reductions would need to be identified before the board begins reviewing potential reduction options. If that amount cannot be identified, Blanco said, recommended cuts to central office or school-based services would need to go deeper to make up the difference.
Central office reductions that have been identified so far include about $4.9 million that district officials have dubbed Tier 1. They include potential cuts to certificated and classified personnel in business, communications, facilities, food services, human resources, innovative technology, academics, curriculum, early childhood, enrollment, language, special education and student wellness.
Blanco said Tier 2 and 3 reductions to the central office would be presented to the Board of Education if the $5 million to $10 million could not be found in the other workstreams.
“That isn’t something that any of us want, and that’s why we’re trying really hard to make sure that we find any revenue money that’s available that can take the place of having to take those actions,” Blanco said.
The town hall concluded with a panel of district leaders fielding questions submitted online that covered topics such as layoffs, school consolidation, facility management, salary reductions and athletics.
Wednesday’s town hall was streamed live on the KLRN Pasadena YouTube channel.
An in-person town hall will be held Monday, Nov. 10, at 6:30 p.m. inside the Pasadena High School gymnasium. The Board of Education will hold a study session on the recommended potential reductions on Nov. 13 and will take action on the recommendations at a meeting scheduled for Nov. 20.
The Board will take action on recommendations from the following workstreams: the Superintendent Budget Advisory Committee, central office reductions and contracts.
“These are not abstract numbers,” Board of Education President Jennifer Hall Lee said. “They are real and they are urgent.”
For more information, visit pusd.us/budget.