A week that began with a volunteer committee advising no Pasadena Unified school mergers ended Thursday, May 14, with calls from the public for more than half the district’s Board of Education to resign their seats.
One of those calls came from the mayor of a Sierra Madre, served by PUSD trustees under fire for what many see as violations of public accountability laws and for appearing to pre-determine the outcome of an effort to consolidate school campuses.
The Board of Education gathered Thursday night for a special closed session meeting about anticipated litigation. While the agenda did not spell out exactly what that litigation might be, members of the public filled in those blanks.
Parents and students held up recall signs while demanding that Board President Tina Fredericks and Trustees Yarma Velázquez, Scott Harden and Kimberly Kenne be ousted from their seats.
Fredericks, Velázquez, Harden and Kenne were called out specifically after a published report revealed internal communications obtained by public records request. In the records, the four trustees appeared to coordinate around support for the consolidation process before any formal votes had taken place.
The process — an attempt to cut costs at the district — has exploded into controversy in recent months. Many parents and stakeholders have fiercely sought to keep their campuses open, rather than merge into other schools. But the backlash has a whole new layer after texts appeared to show trustees getting ahead of the process.
The revelations came hours before the final meeting of the Superintendent’s School Consolidation Advisory Committee. Committee members questioned the entire months-long process in light of the report and later voted against all proposed school merger scenarios.
On Thursday, a series of public commenters, starting with Sierra Madre Mayor Kris Lowe, an educator who called on trustees to resign and warned of potential recalls.
Lowe took particular aim at Fredericks, who represents Sierra Madre’s District 6 in PUSD.
“Every time she’s been elected she doesn’t follow through on her work with our city and our students in our city, so we never really saw much representation and we called her out on that,” Lowe said. “So this wasn’t surprising that she would do something illegal and unethical.”
Fredericks and the rest of the Board of Education could not be reached for comment Friday, May 15.
Lowe said most of the Board of Education’s work does not pique the interest of people without kids in Sierra Madre, but this week Lowe has been fielding dozens of text messages about the saga from constituents.
“When you hear that your elected officials have done something illegally that has wasted public funds that all of us have paid into, then everyone stands up and listens,” Lowe said.
Lowe said the actions revealed in the records violated the Brown Act, California law that governs how government boards are to conduct public business.
“It’s so that people couldn’t do their conniving and deciding how to spend public funds and how programming and how things are run behind the scenes,” Lowe said of the Brown Act. “It’s supposed to be a public forum, it’s supposed to be for the people.”
Reacting to the news that there would be no ongoing litigation reported out from closed session last night, PTA President Lisa Kroese called the situation “disappointing.”
“I wish that the trustees would do what many of us think would be the right thing for the district and the students,” Kroese said. “There’s gonna be more wasted money.”
According to state law, recall petitions are submitted to the local election office and require a certain number of signatures based on a percentage of registered voters.
The next regular Board of Education meeting is scheduled for Thursday, May 28. Despite no recommendation on school mergers, trustees have the final say and are expected to vote on potential closures at the Thursday, June 25 meeting.