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PUSD Parents Invited to Thursday Meeting on Community Schools Plan (link): At a meeting Thursday, Pasadena Unified parents will have a chance to participate in a community meeting at Pasadena High on the 2013-16 School / City / Community work plan for the district and the City of Pasadena.
According to a message from the district, that plan focuses on what the priorities of PUSD and city officials should be with regards to the school district.
At a joint meeting in February, it was decided officials should focus on seven distinct areas: seven result areas: early childhood education; academic success; health and social services; involvement and learning in the community; stable and supportive environments; family engagement, and system-wide delivery.
At Thursday's meeting, PUSD families and community members will have a chance to give feedback on plan specifics and to join a volunteer "results team" to focus on how to implement specific parts of the plan.
PUSD families and residents of Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre are all invited to the event.
It is good that Dan Abendschein brought this topic up because there is a very important Sierra Madre angle to this. Dan didn't actually pick up on it much, but he certainly did open the door.
Look above to the paragraph I put up in bold letters. There is a reference to a "joint meeting in February." Which there was, and I am quite familiar with that meeting because I went to it. This was a joint meeting held with the Pasadena City Council and the Pasadena Unified School District. And it was at that time Pasadena approved this rather controversial "Community Schools Plan."
But here is the catch. Neither the City of Altadena nor the City of Sierra Madre, Pasadena's supposed coequal partners in the PUSD, were ever made aware that this "Community Schools Plan" was being OK'd on their behalf. It was done with neither city's knowledge or approval.
This despite the fact that both of these apparently orphaned cities pay taxes into the PUSD system, with many of their children attending these schools as well. Nobody ever asked Sierra Madre or Altadena what they think of this "community schools plan." Nor have any members of the Pasadena Unified School District's Board of Education appeared before the governing bodies of either of these cities to ask for their blessings on this matter.
Yet a full (and extremely long and wordy, trust me) Board of Education presentation on the Community Schools Plan was given to the Pasadena City Council back in February, which then voted to approve it.
So what is this "Community Schools Plan?" Why are our hard earned - and rare - education tax dollars being spent on it, and without any input whatsoever from the elected officials of two out of the three member cities? Here are a couple of excerpts from an article I posted last February 20th subtitled "Welcome to Chu-ville" (link):
While some of you were hanging out at The State of the City address with Mayor Mo' Money, I nipped over to Pasadena City Hall for their joint City Council - PUSD gathering. There experiencing an entirely different fog bank of bromides and wheeze. Most of the usual Board of Education types were on hand, along with Judy Chu, who was in the hizzy to speak on behalf of something near and dear to her heart. On the surface the whole thing had a atmosphere similar to what had happened in our Council Chambers just a few weeks ago.
Except that when the BOE was in Sierra Madre they left out something kind of important.
At the Pasadena City Council confab last night they were all about something called "Community Schools." A do-gooder boondoggle of an exercise in bureaucratic welfare excess that presumes to tell all PUSD families how they should eat, study, medicate, exercise, socialize, house, and just about every other aspect of their lives.
Or, as the always eloquent Tony Brandenburg put it, "The Pasadena Community School Plan of condos, condoms, computers, fresh fruit and vegetables, drugs bad and public health good, all little more than a weaving together of a whole bunch of failed social programs and placed under a new happy face umbrella."
All apparently done with the purpose of preparing PUSD students and their hapless families for something Pasadena apparently believes they can't do on their own, cope with the real world.
(I miss Tony.)
The catch here is that the PUSD Board of Education had been to Sierra Madre a few weeks earlier to participate in a similar joint meeting with our City Council. And while there was a lot of talk about our then at risk Middle School, the "Community Schools Plan" was never mentioned. Not even once.
So here is the question I asked the Board of Education at their joint meeting with the Pasadena City Council:
Why was this Community Schools Plan not mentioned when the PUSD's Board of Education visited with Sierra Madre a few weeks ago? After all, we will be expected to help fund this new level of education bureaucracy.
This is how I described the reply I received:
I actually did get a response to this question, and that was an admission from Renatta Cooper that indeed they had not talked to anyone in Sierra Madre about any of this. Which becomes even more bizarre when you consider that (Board Member) Ed Honowitz had apparently been working on the plan for 6 long years.
And as far as I know the Board of Education still hasn't discussed their Community Schools Plan with Sierra Madre's City Council. Not one peep. Despite the fact that a chunk of our tax money will be going to fund it.
So let me ask you a question. If you had kids in PUSD schools, wouldn't you want them learning in an environment where math, science and the language arts are recognized as being the most important considerations?
Or would you want them in schools where a Peter Dreier-style extended social welfare system is considered a more appropriate daily lifestyle priority?
Don't you think the Board of Education should have at least asked us first? Or Altadena? Before inviting out the folks for a little social welfare indoctrination?
Instead just rolling with this on the word of Pasadena alone?
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