PUSD Candidates Weigh-In on Key Issues

Pasadena Organizing for Progress, a “multi-issue community organization whose mission is to make Pasadena a more just, equitable, and inclusive city,” recently hosted a Pasadena Unified School District candidate forum at the Pasadena Job Center, featuring five contenders for the PUSD School Board.

The standing-room-only presentation posed questions ranging from cultural insights to the vagaries of the PUSD budget and funding propositions and how to overcome students’ flight to other districts.

Participants included Lisa Kroese, District 6; Scott Harden, District 4; Tina Wu Fredericks, District 6; Juan Carlos Perez, District 2; and Jennifer Hall Lee, District 2. (Comments are edited for brevity and focus).

We summarized their answers to questions about special education and African-American student opportunities.

Q: How would you rate PUSD services for students with disabilities?

Lee:  We absolutely must demand full funding. We are definitely in our infancy with special education in public education, and in PUSD, an IEP can be difficult to implement. Every school has to have inclusive practices, which means we need to have some money for the teachers in the classroom. Children are infinitely complex, and my focus is on the whole child. I am human-driven, not data-driven. Data inform me, of course. It can tell us all sorts of things, but I am human-driven.

Kroese: We need to move things along faster so that people can have their assessments faster. We need to provide more support to teachers so that when there is an IEP or a 504 for a child, they can actually have it implemented. You’re not always with your kid to explain their accommodations to every person that they come into contact with. Smaller class sizes would bring that number up for us. The main function of the board is our fiduciary oversight. We have to do a better job of making sure that every penny goes into the classroom so that we can give these kids and their families all of the support and all of the services that they need. We should strive to lead in this and in everything that we do.

Perez: Over the last ten years, the costs for special education have increased by 84 percent, which is an astronomical number, and it makes things very difficult, particularly when we’re trying to offer individualized services to our students. We need more staffing and resources than are available, and of course, this is compounded by the fact that the state has reduced funding. We need to explore partnerships with regional education centers and share special education resources and services. We can also advocate for increased state and federal funding that’s specifically targeted at special education. We can implement an early intervention program to identify and support students with special needs sooner,  which can help reduce the need for more intensive and costly interventions later.

Harden: We are not serving our students with disabilities very well at all. It’s unconscionable the lack of funding that is provided, especially by the federal government. I’m interested in alternative funding models that allow us to target students more precisely rather than block grant funding. I want to work with our Superintendent in terms of developing a strategic plan specifically for special education so that the public can see the goals that we’re setting both with the school board and with the Superintendent and see measurable actions and implementations happen over some time and actually see the improvement.

Fredericks:  It takes three times more funding to educate special education students than for general education students. The problem is that the federal government is only putting up 8 percent of the 40 percent that they promised us decades ago. We’re constantly trying to serve these kids but with no funding or very little funding. We are understaffed and overloaded. If we were actually fully funded, we would be serving these students much better. Board members from across California and the country go to Washington, DC, every year to advocate for more funding.

Q:  With the Black Student and Family Task Force and Pan-African Immersive Storytelling Academy in place, what are your ideas for this initiative to empower African American families and increase achievement levels for students?

Lee: I support the Pan African Academy, which has been proposed, and the board is very excited about it. I’m excited about it because traditionally, over the decades, black children have been behind, not being treated with the respect that they deserve because of racist biases in our community and our country. I’m totally supportive.

Kroese: Our African American Parent Council works with developing innovative programs so that we can get support for children very early. If we do not support children very early at the foundational level, it becomes almost impossible to catch up. We need to figure out what things are working and how the district can provide resources so that we can make it happen everywhere throughout the district. We can’t stop until we have absolutely equal and equitable results for all our children.

Perez: The legacy of the red-line districts creates disparity, misunderstanding, and distrust. There’s also just a level of,  and I hate to say this, ignorance in our community in terms of what our schools provide. When we talk about equity in Pasadena, we shouldn’t just be talking about socioeconomic disparity. There still is a lot of lingering misunderstanding, and you might even say prejudice is an obstacle to their future. The difference between being tolerated in a space and welcomed in a space makes an enormous difference in a child’s future.

Harden: It’s going to do amazing things to celebrate identity and cultural heritage. The PTA Council, which oversees and cares for 21 PTA’s, partnered with the African American Parent Council to help over 200 students attend the Black College Expo. They learned about historically black colleges, applied to them on-site, and got accepted on-site. It’s opened new pathways to college in our district, ensuring that our black students feel that they are part of the future of our schools.

Fredericks:  The current board, including myself, is very supportive of the recommendations to form a new Academy for black students. It’s an absolute shame that black students continually are achieving at such low rates. This initiative is going to lift those achievement scores. There’s such a legacy of the black community here. We talk about achievement gaps and opportunity gaps, but the other level is the belief gap. They need to feel like we believe in them.