Show us the money

We’re all for public schools and giving kids every opportunity to succeed in life with a quality education.

Then again, we’re also really into ensuring that government agencies which operate with public money do so efficiently, with great transparency and little waste.

Unfortunately, neither frugality nor openness have ever been strong characteristics of the Pasadena Unified School District, which now joins all California public school systems in suffering the impacts of a nearly $14 billion state budget deficit.

Shrapnel from the state’s fiscal bombshell is already blistering the Pasadena district, which over the past two years has laid off teachers and employees and is now being forced to consider cutting even deeper, possibly scrapping arts and other “non-essential” programs to make ends meet.

But also during this time, the district’s enrollment — its main source of income, which is all based on daily attendance — has dropped precipitously, so much so that the PUSD Board of Education was forced two years ago to shutter four schools, three of them in Altadena.

For some, the answer is simple: Put a bond measure on the ballot to generate the funding needed to keep the district operating in its present form. (Please see our story on page 10.)

Others, however, aren’t so sure that’s a good idea — not because students and teachers deserve less but because the district has been consistently wasteful in its spending and evasive about its true financial condition, all the while pleading poverty.

We don’t want to sound cynical, but we have to ask what any other taxpayer with or without children in local schools might: Could Pasadena schools actually be as broke as supporters of a bond measure say? Or this: Could the PUSD do a better job of managing and using the money that it already has at its disposal?

At its meeting Tuesday, the school board approved a $350 million bond measure to be placed on the ballot in the Nov. 4 General Election.

That’s a lot of money to educate fewer than 20,000 children. But more to the point, that’s a lot of debt to carry for each and every property owner in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, with or without children enrolled in public schools.

Property owners still have roughly two decades to continue paying for Measure Y, the 1997 bond measure aimed at repairing local schools. If this bond passes, that’s another 30 years of debt for those folks.

One reason to go for a general obligation bond over a parcel tax is the bond requires fewer votes to pass: 55 percent as opposed to 66.7 percent for a parcel tax. But in both cases, property owners would get hit with a bill each year, a proposition which, according to a recent survey conducted by the PUSD, didn’t go over very well with people asked for an opinion.

More than 52 percent of those surveyed about the parcel tax, or a flat fee imposed on a property, said they would approve a $40 annual tax to support local schools. But that number dropped to 47 percent when the amount was raised to $50, and then fell to 37 percent when those polled were asked if they would be more likely to support a $60 per year tax.

The results of the bond survey were a little closer, with 53 percent saying they would approve a bond, and 5 percent saying they were leaning toward approval. With those figures, the board concluded there was support for the imposition of a $50-a-year fee for every $100,000 of a property’s assessed value.

Then again, that same survey also showed that the public generally has a poor perception of the district. Only 38 percent of those polled felt PUSD was headed in the right direction, and only 31 percent felt the district provided a good education.

Eleven years ago, 73 percent of voters approved Measure Y with high hopes for repairing the district’s aging buildings, some of which are more than 50 years old. And much of that work remains. Sheesh, for that kind of scratch, they could have built 10 schools and had money left over for every kid to have their own bathroom, or so the average person must think.

And that’s a big part of the problem for the PUSD: People will surely be asking: What exactly did we get from the last bond? Better schools? Higher scores? Smarter, happier kids? A more efficient and productive administration?

Good thing we aren’t cynics. But we are skeptics, and until the district starts doing a better job of explaining its true financial condition, and just what exactly this money will buy us over all that time, it is not possible at this time to support a bond measure to bail out local schools.. 

A quick thank you is due to Pasadena Star-News Public Editor Larry Wilson for publicly recognizing Pasadena Weekly City Reporter André Coleman’s LA Press Club award for his coverage of a racial feud between a mixed-race couple and an African-American former LAPD officer living next door who objects to interracial relationships.

But we also want to point out that former PW reporter Natalie Dunbar actually broke that story six years ago.

So thank you, too, Nat. Great job.
For André’s latest take on the story — now the plotline of a major motion picture — see page 9.