Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Guest Essay | Jennifer Hall Lee: PasadenaLEARNS Community Showcase Was Spectacular

The annual PasadenaLEARNS Expanded Learning Opportunities Program Community (ELOP) annual Community Showcase was held on May 17 at the District headquarters and it was spectacular.

For those who aren’t familiar with this unique accoutrement of the Pasadena Unified School District, the PasadenaLearns ELOP program is PUSD’s after and before school extended learning program which includes a yearly summer program for students.

Superintendent Dr. Blanco said “Students have opportunities to explore the arts, participate in athletics, and receive academic support. This showcase celebrates the joy, creativity, and sense of belonging that our students experience after the bell rings.”

All nineteen PUSD schools offering LEARNS/ELOP participated in the showcase along with hundreds of parents, community members and LEARNS staff who were in attendance.

Harmony Cano, the Coordinator of Expanded Learning said that the showcase “highlights our students’ exploration of the arts, their commitment to teamwork, and the strength of the communities that support them.”

The MC for the various activities was fifth grader Alexa Campos from Madison Elementary.

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Ashes to Anthems Returns as a Full-Day Juneteenth Gathering for Altadena Fire Survivors

The Legacy Land Project’s second benefit festival, set for June 20, pairs a free daytime resource fair with a ticketed evening concert, with proceeds directed to Eaton Fire recovery

When the Legacy Land Project staged the first Ashes to Anthems last spring, it was a single benefit concert. This June, the Altadena nonprofit is asking fire survivors to spend the whole of Juneteenth together — a free afternoon of vendors, food and recovery services that gives way to a ticketed evening concert, all of it built around keeping displaced families rooted in their own neighborhoods.

Ashes to Anthems returns Saturday, June 20, on Juneteenth weekend, but in its second year it is no longer the lone concert that drew crowds to a Pasadena park in 2025. The Legacy Land Project, a Black-led nonprofit formed in response to the Eaton Fire, has reframed the event as a full-day Juneteenth festival: an afternoon vendor village and community marketplace that builds toward a 7 p.m. headliner concert.

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Consultant Hands School Board a Campus Closures Roadmap, Even After Advisory Panel Says No

The Total School Solutions analysis preserves every closure scenario the advisory committee rejected, leaving trustees with a full menu of options ahead of a June 25 decision

An outside consulting firm engaged by Pasadena Unified School District has delivered to the Board of Education a draft Equity Impact Analysis that models school closure and consolidation scenarios across the district — including the potential shuttering of high school and elementary campusess and multiple middle-grade programs — handing trustees a scenario-by-scenario roadmap even though the Superintendent’s own advisory committee voted earlier this month to recommend no closures at all.

The draft analysis, prepared by Total School Solutions and scheduled for presentation to the Board on Thursday, May 28, applies the nine metrics required under Assembly Bill 1912 to each scenario. The result is a state-mandated equity review that remains on the table regardless of what the Superintendent’s School Consolidation Advisory Committee recommended, and one the Board may adopt, modify or decline to consider.

Under AB 1912,

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Young Musicians March Toward the Fourth of July in PUSD’s $25 Summer Band Camp

Rising fifth- through eighth-graders can train at Pasadena High School and earn a spot in the Sierra Madre parade

For $25 a week, a middle schooler with a trumpet case and two free weeks in June can land a spot marching in the Sierra Madre Fourth of July Parade.

That is the offer from the Pasadena Unified School District’s TEAM PUSD Summer Band Camp, which opens June 22 at Pasadena High School. The five-week program, run by the district’s PasadenaLEARNs Expanded Learning Programs, pairs rising fifth- through eighth-grade students with PUSD music teachers and high school student mentors to learn marching fundamentals, percussion, color guard, and instrumental performance. Students who complete both Week 1 and Week 2, according to the program announcement, earn the chance to perform in Sierra Madre’s annual Independence Day parade.

The camp runs in weekly sessions through July 24. Chad Prado, a PUSD music educator based at Sierra Madre Middle School, leads the first three weeks.

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

Guest Opinion | Meredith Murphy, Ph.D.: What’s Being Ignored in the Proposal to Close and “Consolidate” Blair Middle/High School

Most students and families would be saddened by their school being closed, but the prospect is especially heartbreaking when you have very intentionally chosen that school. My daughter, Fiona, is a 6th grader at Blair Middle School. Blair isn’t the school we’re zoned for. In fact, we don’t live in Pasadena; we live in Highland Park and are zoned for LAUSD. We chose Blair because, after touring various options, we were certain it was the best fit for Fiona. I know there are many other families like ours – those who aren’t zoned for Blair but chose it, or even fought through the maddening interdistrict permitting process, because they found the school they believed would best serve their children (as an aside, interdistrict students provide a financial benefit to PUSD).

The current proposal to shutter Blair, separate the middle and high schools, and merge them each with a different school, is hugely problematic. The proposal touts vague benefits of increased academic and elective opportunities. But what proponents of closures fail to acknowledge is that Blair is more than just some buildings.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

California Judges Are Testing A New AI Clerk, and You Won’t Know If It’s Looking At Your Case

By Cayla Mihalovich and Khari Johnson, CALMATTERS

Two of California’s largest courts are testing an AI tool that can draft orders and produce research memos.

Judges so far are using it primarily for civil cases, but documents obtained by CalMatters indicate the possibility of expanded applications in criminal cases, where people’s freedom and access to justice are on the line.

The Los Angeles County Superior Court began a pilot program in February to test a tool created by the company Learned Hand. Other courts may follow, according to Learned Hand founder and chief executive officer Shlomo Klapper.

Learned Hand uses a combination of language models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to act as an AI clerk for judges. The company says it tests for bias and accuracy, but it has not yet published results.

In Riverside County, which has a $10,000 agreement with the company to test the program, civil and probate attorneys are primarily using the tool to draft research memos that help judges reach their decisions.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Michelle Huneven Returns to Altadena to Talk About the Town That Shapes Her Fiction

Friday’s “Altadena Revealed” lecture brings the novelist together with historian Michele Zack at the Eaton Fire Collaboratory

The novelist Michelle Huneven lost two Altadena homes in the Eaton Fire last January. Her sixth novel, “Bug Hollow,” published last June with a dedication that reads simply “To Altadena,” instantly seduced reviewers and readers. On Friday, May 29, from 7 to 9:30 p.m., Huneven returns to her hometown for a conversation about both the book and the place, in conversation with her longtime friend, journalist and historian Michele Zack.

The event is the latest in the Altadena Revealed Lecture Series, presented by the Foothill Catalog Foundation in collaboration with Pasadena Heritage, Altadena Heritage, the Bungalow Heaven Landmark District and the Altadena Historical Society. The talk is titled “Writing Underfoot — Or, why Michelle Huneven sets her novels in Altadena.”

“Bug Hollow” follows the Samuelsons, a middle-class Altadena family, across five decades. Reviewers in The New York Times and the Washington Post praised its “lovely,

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Take Dad Onto the Rose Bowl Field

So your father knows exactly who played the 1957 Rose Bowl — Oregon State versus Iowa, thanks for asking — and he has Opinions about Myron Hunt’s original 1922 design every time he spots the stadium on television.

He’s earned this one.

Enter Pasadena Heritage’s Father’s Day Tour of the Rose Bowl, a Sunday-only deep cut into the parts of the stadium most ticket holders never see. The locker rooms. The corridors behind the corridors. The field itself — yes, you can walk it, and yes, the tour promises the chance to kick a football on it. Docents handle the anecdotes; your dad handles the trivia he’s been saving since Reagan was president.

Two tours, June 21: one at 10 a.m., one at 2 p.m. Tickets are $65 a head and won’t last — Pasadena Heritage members get a discount code via Nick@pasadenaheritage.org. Bring the dad who already knows every team and concert that’s rolled through since 1922, and let the docents tell him three things he doesn’t.

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Octavia’s Bookshelf Hosts the Author of a New Octavia Butler Biography

Susana M. Morris brings “Positive Obsession” home to the Pasadena bookstore named for her subject

There is a particular kind of full-circle moment built into Wednesday’s event at Octavia’s Bookshelf: Susana M. Morris will read from her new biography of Octavia E. Butler at the Pasadena bookstore that opened in 2023 in Butler’s honor, in the city where Butler grew up.

The conversation and reading runs from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27. Morris’s book, “Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler,” released last year, traces Butler’s path from Pasadena schoolgirl to MacArthur Fellow — the first science fiction writer to win the “genius” award — while situating her work within the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation and the political turbulence that shaped her speculative fiction.

Morris is an associate professor of literature, media and communication at Georgia Tech and a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. Her scholarship centers Black women’s stories and experiences,

Monday, May 25, 2026

Supervisor Barger Honors Fallen Servicemembers in Memorial Day Statement

Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Pasadena and Altadena on the Board of Supervisors, issued a statement Monday honoring military servicemembers who died in defense of the country.

“On Memorial Day, we pause to honor the brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our nation,” Barger said. “Answering the call to defend our country is among the noblest acts of selflessness and courage a person can make.”

Barger, a member of the five-member Board of Supervisors since 2016, represents the Fifth Supervisorial District, the county’s largest, spanning approximately 2,785 square miles and including Pasadena, Altadena, and dozens of other communities across the San Gabriel, Antelope, Santa Clarita, and San Fernando Valleys.

“Freedom is not free,” Barger said. “It comes at a deep cost, carried by those who willingly put themselves in harm’s way to protect the freedoms we too often take for granted. Today, we remember and give thanks to our fallen heroes.”

The statement also extended recognition to Gold Star families and other military families.