Friday, August 14, 2026

Pasadena School Board Trustees Table Nearly Everything at Six-Hour Special Meeting

Trustees approve only forming a committee of the whole — assigned solely to define what “transformation” means — and table the rest of the agenda four days before new school year classes begin

Pasadena Unified’s Board of Education convened Thursday night to set a deadline for voting on which schools to close or consolidate, and adjourned shortly before midnight without setting one.

The special meeting was structured around Resolution 2894, which directs the district to undertake a transformation process, and was run not by the board president but by an outside facilitator, Natalia Guerra, director of community partnerships and impact at Collaborate Pasadena.

But after nearly six hours, the board had approved just a single action item out of five: constituting itself as a committee of the whole, which — as amended from the dais — was given one job: to finish defining what “district transformation” means.

Trustees then voted to table the four remaining action items, including the closure-vote deadline, approval of the data sets needed to make a closure decision, and the first agenda of the committee, which would have taken up removing some schools from the potential closure list.

No date was set for the committee’s first meeting, though the structure trustees adopted allows meetings to begin immediately upon approval. No chair was named. The board’s own working definition of transformation, assembled over more than two hours of reflection rounds, sticky notes and clustering exercises, was left unadopted.

Classes for the new school year begin Monday.

The night’s turn

Guerra opened by disclosing how the evening had been built.

“This discussion we will embark upon today was designed by an agenda planning team, which includes the board president, the superintendent, members of her leadership team, and myself,” she said, adding that her role had turned out to be “less to design this process and more to synthesize ideas and steward our collective vision.”

She also told the room, “Nothing about this [transformation] process has been determined yet.”

The format was unlike a standard board meeting. Trustees sat away from the dais in a restorative-justice discussion circle, passing a glass apple as a talking piece while Guerra kept order.

They read nine community agreements aloud, one at a time — among them “stick within timeframes,” “be clear, be calm, be kind” and “discuss now, decide after” — then added four more from the floor, including “be present” and, at Harden’s suggestion, “presume positive intent.”

Guerra led a round of introductions and a guided breathing exercise paired with a meditation on restorative-justice principles. Ideas the board set aside were assigned to what she called a “community garden.”

Early on, a digital whiteboard she had drafted before the meeting failed to save, and she recreated it live.

By 9:25 p.m., with the agenda behind schedule, the board voted to extend the meeting to midnight. Asked how far behind, Guerra said, “Pretty behind. I would say like an hour.”

The decisive turn came after a break that ran from roughly 10:30 to 10:47 p.m. Guerra returned and announced that the agenda had been cut down.

“We’re not going to be getting to these questions, the date on which to vote for consolidation, the data selection,” she said.

The remaining time, she said, would go to questions from the superintendent’s leadership team and then to committee structure.

“So we’re not going to be talking about deadlines and dates for consolidation. We’re going to be focusing on the structure.”

Trustee Kimberly Kenne asked whether scheduling of community engagement sessions — also called for in Resolution 2894 — would be covered. It would not, Guerra said, adding that during the break “we collectively agreed” it could be pushed to another meeting or added to the agenda of the first committee meeting, “that’s yet to be determined.”

‘A disingenuous strategy’

Board Vice President Dr. Yarma Velázquez, one of four trustees whom public commenters identified as the majority behind Resolution 2894, objected on the record.

“So if we’re not going to do the things that we’re not going to do, when are we going to do them?” she asked. “And then how did we decide not to do them? How is the process of deciding that?”

Guerra answered: “It’s a time consideration. We’re here until midnight.”

“So I want to note that it is a strategy to extend conversations so that we cannot make it through the full agenda,” Velázquez said. “And it feels like a disingenuous strategy not built on trust or transparency.”

Guerra pointed the room back to one of the agreements the board had adopted at the outset — presume positive intent — and then took partial responsibility.

“I think the definition activity took a lot more time than originally allocated, but I think that was important. So that was also a move on my part.”

Velázquez had raised the same concern less than half an hour earlier, before the break, invoking the agreement to stick within time frames.

“I don’t want to use or exploit time discussions as a political stall so that we don’t complete this agenda,” she said then, asking Guerra to impose stricter limits.

Later, during the committee-structure debate, Velázquez voiced a broader frustration: “I just don’t want to be in a situation where every single intervention is, we shouldn’t have this conversation.”

Less than an hour after the “disingenuous” exchange, it was Velázquez who moved the item that did pass.

The vote

With the meeting nearing its midnight cutoff and Guerra noting that a good deal remained unresolved — the committee had no agenda, and the working definition was, in her words, “not even put together yet” — Velázquez moved to approve Action Item D4, committee structure, as a committee of the whole with all trustees as members. Trustee Scott Harden seconded.

A board committee of the whole, under the structure trustees adopted, comprises all seven trustees and the student board member, with the superintendent or a designee in attendance. Meetings would be held in the boardroom, livestreamed and recorded, likely on Thursdays not already occupied by regular board meetings, and would be subject to the Brown Act. No final decision on closures could be made in committee; any official action would require the board to reconvene as the governing board and act by motion and vote. Meetings can start immediately after the board approves the committee.

Board Clerk Patrice Marshall McKenzie then supplied the amendment that reshaped the motion. Saying she did not want the full transformation process to live permanently in a committee of the whole, she asked to narrow it.

“May I amend the motion to clarify that the committee of the whole as it’s being constituted now is to finish the work of defining and clarifying transformation?” she asked. Restating it moments later for the record: “Amending the motion to clarify that this committee of the whole is being constituted in order for the board to continue defining the work of transformation.”

Harden asked whether the change was a friendly amendment.

Trustee Michelle Richardson Bailey answered, “It’s not a friendly.”

Fredericks then asked Velázquez whether she wished to retract her motion. Velázquez accepted the amendment as friendly anyway, and Harden concurred.

Asked by Kenne how the committee’s chair would be selected — Marshall McKenzie noted that a committee of the whole has a chair separate from the board president — Harden said the vote should wait.

“I would propose that at our regular meeting, we vote for a chair,” he said. “The committee is formed, so it can survive without a chair until the general meeting.” No vote was taken on a chair.

The motion passed on a show of hands, with the presiding officer putting the count at six and recording no votes against and no abstentions. Student board member Lula Matsura, whose vote is preferential, said yes.

Harden then moved to table action items D1, D2, D3 and D5.

Velázquez seconded.

Bailey asked for clarification on item 5 — the first committee agenda, including removal of schools from the potential closure list — and was told it was being held “until we can define it.” That motion also passed, and Board President Tina Fredericks adjourned the meeting.

What the board did build

Before the agenda was truncated, trustees spent the bulk of the evening constructing a working definition of district transformation from scratch — first reflecting individually on lessons from the failed spring consolidation process, then generating ideas on color-coded sticky notes, pairing off to narrow them, and clustering and naming the results.

The framework that emerged identified three components: community engagement to identify values and desired outcomes; program assessment in order to sustain programs and increase enrollment; and leadership development, encompassing board professional development, culture and healing. It identified four outcomes: increased operational efficiencies, high-quality facilities, increased revenue, and working toward building trust.

Velázquez synthesized the whole into a single statement during a break, which Guerra read aloud:

“A comprehensive school transformation process will integrate community engagement, program assessment, board leadership development and strategic investment to strengthen programs, increase enrollment, and position schools for long-term success. The transformation process will improve operational efficiencies, align resources with demonstrated needs, increase revenue, evaluate student belonging and happiness, maximize facility utilization, direct investments towards programs with greatest potential for enrollment, growth and sustainability.”

Guerra stressed repeatedly that it remained a working draft.

“This is not the one we’re going to adopt,” she said. It is now the sole assignment of the committee the board created.

The board also completed the data work that preceded the item Guerra cut. Ten categories were read aloud one by one — demographics and enrollment projections; balance of pupil demographics and disproportionality; facilities capacity and conditions; operating costs; projected savings from a school closure; academic special programs impact; impact on feeder-school attendance patterns; transportation; environmental factors; and asset management — alongside a category Kenne described as alternative scenarios with no school closures, or the impact of doing nothing.

Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco identified the language as drawn from AB 1912, and the district’s chief business officer read the statute’s definition into the record: traffic patterns and pickup safety, freeway and major-road proximity, surrounding hazards including industrial pollution and pipelines, and community impacts including the potential for neighborhood blight from a vacant campus.

Trustees then filled out and submitted individual worksheets ranking each category high, medium or low priority.

That exercise was finished. The action item that would have ratified it was tabled.

Where trustees landed

The committee-of-the-whole outcome emerged from a round in which trustees were asked which structure — a two- or three-member board subcommittee, a committee of the whole, or a community committee — should steward the process.

Marshall McKenzie made the case first.

“Given that we haven’t come to clarity and agreement around what and how we’re defining transformation, I think that this body needs to have more discussion,” she said. “We have to establish our baseline first and we have not yet done that.”

Fredericks, who said she had flip-flopped between a subcommittee and a committee of the whole, came down on the latter, citing the night itself.

“It just feels like we need, like Trustee McKenzie’s saying, we need a lot of work to just be at a baseline together. And we should be learning our lessons from the past, not rushing,” she said. “I tend to be like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ And I have to slow down and we have to slow down.”

Trustee Jennifer Hall Lee voted for the structure while rejecting its purpose. “This is all really nice intent, but we’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic here because this board needs so much work that we have to start at ground zero,” she said, calling for “a board committee of the whole on building trust on the board that has nothing to do with transformation. Zero to do with that.”

The board, she said, is not ready for a conversation about transformation or potential consolidation and is “a couple of years away from that on this board as we are now.”

Bailey was blunter still. “We can’t give to the community what we don’t have,” she said. “We need our own transformation. We need to transform this board. We need to adjust and repair our own culture before we can even begin to think about being effective, engaging the community.”

Fredericks laid out the case for acting at all. The district is losing 400 to 500 students a year, she said, “which is an entire school.”

A third of PUSD’s elementary schools are “half full,” and 80% of the budget goes to people. “The fewer schools we have, the more fully staffed schools we have.”