Friday, May 29, 2026

PUSD Board Halts School Closure Plan, Two Trustees Served With Recall Notices

The Pasadena Unified Board of Education halted its school consolidation process Thursday night in a stormy meeting that also saw the in-person delivery of formal recall notices to Board President Tina Fredericks and Trustee Scott Harden.

The board rejected the $230,000 equity analysis that had put Blair, Thurgood Marshall, Don Benito, McKinley, Webster, and Norma Coombs on a potential closure or merger list.

Any future closure recommendation will require the district to start over with a new analysis, the board’s legal advisor at the meeting told trustees. No school is closing under the current process.

The vote followed more than seven hours of meeting time, more than 60 commenters at the opening public comment period and dozens more during item-specific public hearings, including the AB 1912 consolidation hearing, and the in-person delivery of formal notices of intent to circulate recall petitions to Fredericks and Harden.

The rejected consolidation-related document, presented to the board as Resolution 2882, was the work product of Total School Solutions, a consulting firm selected by Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco after a January 22 presentation. Blanco told the board she identified the firm herself based on recommendations from superintendents at neighboring districts and that no trustee had spoken with her about TSS before she made the selection. The TK-8 scenarios paired Don Benito, Webster, Norma Coombs and McKinley with receiving schools. The secondary scenarios contemplated closing Thurgood Marshall and Blair, with multiple options for where those students would be sent.

The Vote

The reversal came after Trustee Michelle Richardson Bailey introduced a substitute motion to reject the resolution outright. Trustee Kimberly Kenne seconded the motion, and it passed.

“This whole process has been compromised,” Bailey said. She also told colleagues, “We need to start over.”

Kenne said that by declining to adopt the resolution, the board was “formally not accepting the equity impact analysis” and “stopping the AB 1912 process.”

Harden had earlier moved to approve receipt of the document while striking the implementation section. During the debate, he asked the procedural advisor whether the committee’s underlying data and work would survive a rejection of the report.

Fredericks argued that rejecting the resolution and adopting it without implementation amounted to the same outcome. “In essence, he’s saying accept it and do nothing. And you’re saying just do nothing. It’s an argument about the same thing,” she told the procedural advisor during the discussion.

The advisor told trustees the substantive consequence was clearer than that framing suggested. “If you’re going to not accept the EIA, then that’s the analysis that’s in there is what you’re essentially rejecting, and you’re going to start over with new data,” the advisor said.

The transcript records the motion as passing but does not specify a vote count; the district had not released a formal vote tally as of publication.

The Process the Board Halted

The rejected analysis was the product of a five-month process that began with the board’s late-2025 passage of Resolution 2852, which set “optimal” school sizes at 800 to 1,200 students for grades six through 12. The resolution gave the superintendent authority to begin analyzing potential consolidations.

Total School Solutions worked with a 33-member School Consolidation Advisory Committee selected from more than 150 applicants. At the committee’s May 11 meeting, members voted not to recommend any of the closure scenarios they had been asked to evaluate.

Joseph Pandolfo, the Total School Solutions consultant who presented the report, told the board the AB 1912 process is “the gold standard in the state” for ensuring closure decisions avoid disproportionality, and that the board could accept, reject or modify the committee’s recommendations.

Recall Notices Served

During public comment, recall organizer Dawn Dennison formally served Fredericks with a notice of intent to recall, citing what she described as Brown Act violations and closed-door deliberations surrounding the consolidation process.

“Multiple Brown Act violations, closed-door deliberations and lack of transparency surrounding anything of this has broken all of it,” Dennison said to the board. “You focused on real estate development when your responsibility is student development and achievement.”

Marisol Tansey, a Longfellow Elementary parent, separately served Harden, who represents District 4, with his own recall notice. Tansey said Harden had publicly opposed school closures during his 2019 campaign and reversed course after taking office.

“Mr. Harden has fundamentally broken our trust,” Tansey said. “Public record indicates he participated in private closed-door coordination regarding disclosures, raising serious concerns about transparency and Brown Act compliance.”

A separate speaker described the recall efforts as politically motivated.

“A recall is not a substitute for that process,” the speaker said. “A recall is a political weapon, and right now it is being used to stop an honest conversation about what kind of school district PUSD can actually sustain.”

Brown Act Statements

The board included an agenda item titled “Board Member Statement regarding Records Disclosure,” under which Harden, Kenne and Fredericks each addressed communications between trustees that had recently been released through California Public Records Act requests.

Harden acknowledged what he described as “sarcastic and cynical statements” in personal text messages and apologized to anyone he may have offended. He said he had been invited to a single meeting with Total School Solutions to watch a presentation and “made no effort to endorse them, recommend their hire to anyone, direct their work, or conspire to achieve any specific result.”

Kenne said she also regretted her own text exchanges with fellow trustees.

“I do regret my sarcastic tone and facetious texts with fellow board members,” she said, adding that “while I believe the messages as referenced in recent media have been taken out of context, it was never my intention to do something that would cause a distraction from the important work we are trying to accomplish.”

Kenne said she had no contact with Total School Solutions before the firm’s January 22 board presentation.

“Ms. Fredericks did not share any plan for specific school closures with me, and I did not see any part of it until reading the summary in the recent newspaper article,” Kenne said.

Fredericks addressed a set of consolidation slides she had developed in October 2025 using her personal email account.

“At no time did Total School Solutions ever review or contribute to my slides,” she said. “Notably, the conclusions of Total School Solutions were significantly different from mine.”

She said the slides were “first created in October 2025 as part of my own personal notes” before the firm was hired. She also said “the board had no part in the selection of total school solutions” and described the firm’s eventual selection by the superintendent as a coincidence.

Fredericks said she had not made up her mind regarding any specific school closures or consolidations.

Fiscal Context

Several public commenters argued that delaying consolidation would trigger a Los Angeles County Office of Education takeover. Blanco told the board after the vote that the warning was inaccurate.

“We created a fiscal stabilization plan, and we are fiscally stable with a positive certification for right now,” Blanco said.

A Blair parent Dr. Denise Robb pointed out to the board the district had received a positive budget certification from the LACOE board five weeks before the meeting.

Blanco also said the savings from the proposed closure scenarios “added up to a drop in the bucket” compared to the district’s structural deficit. The district is in the middle of spending $500 million in bond funds, with approximately $1 billion in additional bond authority remaining, Kenne said during the discussion.

Earlier in the meeting, during public comment, Marshall parent Sarah Poggi read into the record what she described as a December 1, 2025 email she said was sent by the Total School Solutions CEO, copying TSS Executive Vice President Joseph Pandolfo, to trustees Fredericks, Yarma Velázquez and Harden. According to Poggi’s reading, the email stated, in part: “I think it would be best to not mention our discussions to the superintendent and let her own the process. In my meeting with her, I’m not planning to bring up our meetings and conversations with you guys.”

Next Steps

The board adjourned without adopting a framework to replace the AB 1912 process. Counsel told trustees the rejection of the resolution effectively halts the process and any revival would require a new analysis.

Harden proposed using the board’s scheduled June 13 retreat to “engage with willing community leaders to sort of co-design a healing framework” and align future planning with the district’s Facilities Master Plan process.

Kenne said the next phase should connect the consolidation conversation to a previously promised program review and to ongoing facilities planning. No motion was adopted Thursday setting a specific date for the board to resume consolidation work.

Board Clerk Patrice Marshall McKenzie said the board’s “primary obligation is to serve students” and that public trust had been lost. “Regardless of who is alleged to have done what or not, we are one board,” she said.