Thursday, November 6, 2025

Virtual Town Hall Lays Out PUSD’s Money Problem — But Not The Pain

By EDDIE RIVERA

District leaders tell families: $30–$35 million in cuts are coming; details will wait for board votes in November

Pasadena Unified School District officials used Wednesday morning’s virtual town hall to level with families: the district must find $30 million to $35 million in savings or new revenue in the next budget cycle, and the Los Angeles County Office of Education is watching.

But for all the charts, explanations and reassurances, what the meeting did not provide was the thing many parents were waiting to hear — which schools, which programs, and which positions are most likely to face the cuts.

The session, hosted from PUSD headquarters by Collaborate PASadena Executive Director G. Albert, was billed as a transparency exercise, a chance to walk the community through the financial bind created by declining enrollment, the end of one-time COVID money, a drop in unduplicated pupil percentage, and rising costs the state doesn’t fully pay for. It was also a chance to prepare the public for two key board meetings — Nov. 13 and Nov. 20 — when the seven-member board is expected to start making the hard choices.

“The Pasadena Unified School District is at a critical moment,” Board of Education President Jennifer Hall-Lee said at the outset. She reminded viewers that the county only “conditionally approved” the district’s 2025-26 budget and gave PUSD a deadline to submit a board-approved fiscal stabilization plan identifying $30 million to $35 million in reductions and/or new revenue.

“These are not abstract numbers,” she said. “They are real and they are urgent.”

Superintendent Dr. Elizabeth Blanco, flanked by her leadership team — Chief Academic Officer Dr. Helen Chan Hill, Chief of Human Resources and Acting Chief Business Officer Dr. Sergio Canal, and Assistant Superintendent of Wellness and Student Support Dr. Julianne Reynoso — underscored the same message. Pasadena, she said, is “at a critical turning point,” but she framed the crisis as an opening to “reimagine, reinvent, and do some transformation,” insisting that student experience would remain the center of the conversation.

Over the last three years, district leaders said, PUSD has already taken significant bites out of its central office budget — $13.8 million in 2024-25, another $5 million identified the following year, with guidance from the Superintendent’s Budget Advisory Committee, or SBAC. Those moves were designed, as Hall-Lee put it, to “shield students in classrooms for as long as possible.”

What’s different now is that there isn’t enough left in the far-from-the-classroom categories to solve the problem. With enrollment still sliding, COVID relief gone, transportation and special education costs rising faster than revenue, and this year’s 4 percent drop in the students who qualify for extra state money, the district has to look closer to students and schools.

That is why the SBAC — a group of employees, parents, students, labor partners and community members — was reconvened this fall and asked to do the hardest version of the work: rank school-based services for possible reduction. Dr. Chan Hill, who chaired the committee, was careful to say the committee “is not the final decision maker,” but its rankings will go to the board, side-by-side with other work streams on contracts, central office, special education, transportation and asset management.

To soften the blow, the district showed viewers a sample, “fictional” chart of how those rankings will look: programs and services stacked from “easiest to reduce” to “most difficult to reduce,” with a line showing how far the board would have to go down the list to reach the dollar target. District officials made clear that the board can move that line up or down — which means no school or program is technically safe until the Nov. 20 vote.

Parents looking for a headline like “these five schools will merge” or “these seven positions are gone” didn’t get it. Blanco said specifically that some scenarios, such as sharing administrators among campuses, have been done in PUSD before, but she declined to list specific sites because “these are very sensitive topics and we want to be respectful of our employees.” She also noted that reductions will not happen midyear; any layoffs or position eliminations would be for the next fiscal year, with notices going out by March 2026.

The question of school consolidation — always a live topic in a district with shrinking enrollment and valuable real estate — surfaced repeatedly in the online questions. Blanco acknowledged that Pasadena has convened consolidation committees “three of the four” times in recent years, but she said the district has never actually followed all of the recommendations, in part because closing schools is “a very painful process.” Hall-Lee added that even the talk of school closures can scare off prospective families, especially in a city with a high concentration of private schools and charters.

Instead, district leaders pointed to “asset management” — long-term ground leases of underused properties, staff housing now moving toward construction, and increases in leases and civic-center permits — as a more realistic way to bring money into the general fund without closing campuses right now. Blanco said one goal of aiming for the high end of the $30–$35 million range is to be able to push more money back to school sites so principals have some autonomy even as central services shrink.

Meeting viewers also pressed on a sensitive point: whether the central office is being protected while school-based services take the hit. Both Blanco and Dr. Chan Hill pushed back, saying PUSD has already removed central office positions “for two years in a row” and has a third tier of reductions ready if the other savings don’t materialize. Canal, speaking in his business-officer role, ticked through what’s actually in the district’s contract spending — special education providers the district can’t hire on its own, utilities, transportation, insurance, IT — to show that not all of that $28 million is discretionary.

What the district did do — repeatedly — was explain why the number isn’t a single, fixed amount. Some elements, like the midyear hit to the unduplicated pupil count, are still being recalculated. Some grant-funded positions may move on or off the cut line. Some costs, like insurance and utilities, are still moving. Some revenues, like the new $4 million block grant and future lease revenue, will help — but not right away. That is why officials said the district still needs to identify “an additional five to $10 million” before the Nov. 13 study session.

In the end, Wednesday’s town hall did what district leaders said it would do: it laid out the problem, showed the process, and told the community when decisions will be made. It did not, and probably could not yet, tell families exactly whose job or which program will disappear.

For that, everyone will have to watch the PUSD Board on Nov. 13 — and again on Nov. 20 — when the line on that ranking sheet finally lands. An in-person town hall is set for Nov. 10 at 6:30 p.m. at Pasadena High School’s gymnasium, and officials urged families to keep sending questions through the district’s online form.