The Brief

Facing a multi-million-dollar budget shortfall for the upcoming school year, Pasadena Unified's school board voted unanimously this week to finalize a plan to send layoff notices to more than 160 staff members as part of an effort to balance its budget that began last fall.

The district has maintained that the job reductions are necessary because of a $30 million budget deficit, part of a financial crisis made worse by the Eaton Fire.

California schools must notify employees about potential layoffs for the following school year by March 15. The number of current employees who will be out of a job next year is still unclear, in part, because people may be reassigned to vacant positions. In the past, PUSD has also rescinded some layoff notices before they took effect.

Parents, teachers and union leaders at the Thursday meeting criticized the district for targeting teachers and school staff for layoffs instead of administrative positions.

“ Teaching for PUSD means anxiety every March as it approaches, because we don't know if we're going to get to keep our job or not,” said Genevieve Miller, a PUSD teacher who said her children also graduated from the district. “ There's a different way forward.”

Board members acknowledged the decision they made was difficult.

“ I just want to be very clear that this is not the outcome that anybody prefers,” Board member Yarma Velázquez said. “Workforce reductions and the continuous, year after year position of being in this place where we have to reduce positions is draining and it is painful.

“I am very aware of what the implications are for all of the people that work here at PUSD.”

The board meeting

At the meeting, which started at 4 p.m. and nearly lasted until midnight, parents highlighted the potential of families and teachers choosing to leave the district because of the layoffs.

“ Right now, the [PUSD] community is in fight mode, as you can see from the turnout and other comments being made here tonight,” said parent Neil Tyler. “But if you approve these resolutions as proposed tonight, a large chunk of the community will quickly shift to flight mode and the death spiral of this district will begin.”

Jonathan Gardner, president of United Teachers of Pasadena, told the board that the cuts meant the district would lose dozens of middle and high school teachers and child development staff.

“ The best thing for kids and staff is always stability and making sure that we have full staff,” Gardner said. “The priorities should be working from the student experience out. Instead, what we see is millions and millions of dollars being spent on contracted services and millions and millions being spent on extra staffing at the central office.”

Speakers also noted that Pasadena Unified had endured years of budget cuts, which affected teachers, librarians and office staff.

Others said PUSD was failing to meet its requirement under California law to commit at least 55% of the district’s education expenses to teacher salaries.

LAist reached out to the district for comment on this but has not yet received a response.

Pasadena Unified board members said the cuts were necessary, especially after warnings from regulators that they could be out of compliance with requirements to balance the budget.

“For the sake of the district's solvency, I feel like it would be irresponsible if I took an action that put this district in jeopardy,” board member Michelle Bailey said Thursday night. “I can't in good conscience take that kind of action.”

About the budget issues

Concerns over declining enrollment numbers, which are tied to funding, have been growing since the Eaton Fire.

A report commissioned by a state agency recommended that the state increase its funding for the school system to help with fire recovery.

Some observers said Pasadena Unified’s budget issues date back much longer than that.

“Over the past 30 years, Pasadena Unified has faced a mounting fiscal calamity, one that you can no longer ignore or postpone,” Octavio Castelo, director of business advisory services for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, told Pasadena Unified’s board in November. “Despite your best efforts and intentions, the district has not been able to live within its means."

Cutting staff will likely mean losing some school programs, including language and music.

“ You have Mary Jackson [Elementary in Altadena] — it's a science magnet school, and they're cutting the science teacher,” Gardner, the teacher’s union president, told LAist. “That's the heart of the school.”

What happens next

The layoff notices are expected to be sent to affected staff members by mid-March.

The district will have until summer to finalize the list.

K-12 education reporter Mariana Dale contributed reporting.

Israel's Cabinet unanimously approved a proposal on Sunday to designate violence against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I as a genocide.

The step, which still needs approval in Parliament, reflects deteriorating ties between Israel and Turkey. Turkey has fiercely lobbied to prevent countries from officially recognizing the mass deaths of Armenians around 1915 as a genocide, even as Armenians have pushed for it.

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

For years, Israel never officially broached the subject for fear of angering Turkey, but that relationship has soured over the past two decades, especially as the most recent wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran have dragged on.

"Despite the extensive and unambiguous historical documentation, the Armenian Genocide remains to this day the subject of an institutionalized campaign of denial and minimization, including a manipulative rewriting of history, mainly by the Turkish government," said Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who brought the decision to the government.

He noted that Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have previously described the violence against Armenians as a genocide. But it has never been formally recognized in a vote by Israel's Knesset.

"It is never too late to do the right thing," Saar said Sunday, calling it a "moral and historical duty."

He noted that 32 countries, including the United States, Syria and Lebanon, have also classified the violence as a genocide. It was not immediately known when Sunday's decision, approved unanimously by Israel's Cabinet, would go to the parliament for approval.

Turkey called Israel's move a "politically motivated" step meant to distract from the country's own actions against Palestinians.

"The Israeli government, which systematically persecutes the Palestinian people in full view of the world and is being tried at the International Court of Justice for genocide against the people of Gaza, aims to cover up its own crimes," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"This malicious attempt, which disregards legal and historical facts, reveals the predicament of Netanyahu and his accomplices, who have arrest warrants against them in connection with the investigation into crimes committed against Palestinians at the International Criminal Court," the statement added.

Israel and Turkey were once close allies, but relations soured during the rise of Turkey's Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leading Israel to reconsider its position.

Israel has faced repeated accusations, including from the United Nations and Turkey, that its offensive in Gaza amounts to genocide. Israel, founded in the wake of the Holocaust, denies the accusations.

Israel launched the war in response to Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Gaza's Health Ministry, part of the Hamas government, says over 73,000 people have been killed, roughly half of them women and children. Israel says it does not target civilians and accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

Last week, a team of independent experts commissioned by the United Nations accused Israel of deliberately shooting children in Gaza and repeated accusations that Israel has carried out a genocide. Israel called the report a "libelous sham."
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The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a Mississippi law that allows election officials to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days after it.

The ruling is a loss for the Republican Party, which brought the case, ahead of this year's midterm elections.

Eighteen states and territories, including Mississippi, have such mail ballot grace periods. Most of the states are Democratic-led, including California, Illinois and New York. A dozen additional states have grace periods for ballots returning from overseas, like from military members.

The court's ruling was 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett authoring the opinion, joined in the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's liberal wing of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

"[T]he election-day statutes require the electorate's choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi," Barrett wrote. "But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward."

Justice Samuel Alito authored the dissent, writing in part that the "majority's holding spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans' confidence in election integrity."

How the battle over grace periods ended up at the Supreme Court

These grace periods have historically provided voters time to get their absentee ballots to officials in case there are any issues with the Postal Service — as well as any other unforeseen issues, such as weather events.

But Republicans have been fighting these grace periods in recent years — an effort led by President Trump.

Ahead of the 2024 election, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign filed legal challenges — including one against Mississippi's law — alleging that these grace periods violate the Constitution. They argued that Congress sets the end of an election, not states.

At the time, many of the lawsuits were dismissed by judges across the country, but the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Republicans, setting up the Supreme Court case.

Trump also signed an executive order last year — which was quickly blocked by lower courts — that required that all votes be received by Election Day during federal elections.

Many state officials, particularly in Democratic-run states with universal mail-in ballot programs, raised concerns about such a requirement.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement last year that more than 250,000 ballots that had been postmarked on time arrived after Election Day during the 2024 election.

"Had this rule been in effect," he said, "those voices would have been silenced, especially in rural areas where mail delivery can take longer."
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The Supreme Court on Thursday restricted the use of a relatively new law enforcement technique that allows police to tap into giant tech-firm databases to see who was near the scene of a crime.

Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Elena Kagan said that the technique, known as geofencing, violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches.

A "geofence warrant" entails drawing a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. The government can then seek a warrant to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its users who were within the geofence at the time of the crime.

This case stems from a robbery in the suburbs of Richmond, Va. A man stole $195,000 from a bank, but after two months, the case had gone cold. That is, until detectives served a warrant on Google, asking for the location information of cellphone users in and around the bank for the hour before and after the crime was committed.

Complying with the warrant, Google initially found the names of 19 people who were in or near the bank, but Google pushed back, ultimately providing the police with the names of just three people whose location data showed they were at the bank. When police went to the home of one of them, they found a pistol matching one seen on security camera footage of the robbery and nearly $100,000 in cash. That man, Okello Chatrie, later confessed and was convicted of the crime.

His attorneys argued in filings to the court that geofence searches violate the Fourth Amendment because they allow the government "to search first and develop suspicions later." The geofence warrants in this case directed Google to search millions of users' location histories, meaning that millions of people were subjected to a search despite never having done anything suspicious.

But the government argued in its filings that because people can choose not to give companies like Google their location data, that data is not constitutionally protected.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday overturned a 91-year-old precedent that has prevented presidents from removing members of independent agencies at will. The decision represents a significant win for the Trump administration and a major expansion of the president's control over parts of the government once seen as a check on his powers.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court found that President Trump's March 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful.

Since its creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, Congress has held that commissioners can only be fired for "inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office." Slaughter was presented with no such reason for her removal, only told her "continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with [the Trump] Administration's priorities."

Last summer, a lower court found her firing was unlawful, citing a 1935 landmark decision known as Humphrey's Executor, a case prompted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempted firing of an FTC commissioner over ideological disagreements. The court unanimously held that while the president has the power to remove purely executive officers for any reason, that unlimited power does not extend to agencies like the FTC, whose duties, the court found, "are neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative."

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was appointed in 2018 to fill a Democratic seat on the Federal Trade Commission. She was fired by the Trump administration in 2024.

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Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: "Although it is up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm those with whom the President would prefer to work, neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President's power are subject to removal by him. Then, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."

The three liberal justices dissented.

The independence of the Federal Reserve remains intact — for now. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, can remain in her job until litigation is resolved in the lower courts.

A final blow to a 91-year-old precedent

Thursday's decision marks a final blow to Humphrey's Executor.

"If anything more is left of Humphrey's, the Court overrules it," Robert wrote in the majority opinion.

During Trump's first term, the Supreme Court chipped away at the precedent when it let Trump fire the head of another independent agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

In that case, the Supreme Court held that the firing was permissible because the CFPB is run by a single director rather than a multimember board. Chief Justice John Roberts described Humphrey's Executor as applying only to multimember agencies "that do not wield substantial executive power."

Now with this latest decision, the conservative majority has found reason to give the president power over multimember agencies, too.

The ruling essentially turns FTC commissioners into at-will employees, who serve at the pleasure of the president. It also effectively ends Congress' requirement that the FTC be bipartisan, so that no one party has too much sway.

Congress dictated that no one political party can hold more than three seats on the five-member commission, recognizing the vast influence the FTC has over the lives of everyday Americans.

The agency's commissioners are antitrust experts, uniquely positioned to keep watch over all kinds of companies — big tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers and media companies — ensuring their practices aren't harming regular people.

Now, going forward, there's nothing to stop any president from removing commissioners from the opposing party and leaving the seats vacant, which is what Trump has done.

After his firing of two Democratic FTC commissioners last year, the only remaining commissioners are Republicans.

The independence of a multitude of other agencies also in doubt

The ruling also throws into question the protections afforded to members of a multitude of other federal agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, where Trump has also fired Democratic members.

Like the FTC, those agencies play important roles in the daily lives of Americans, protecting people from discrimination and abuse on the job and unsafe products, including toys.

Congress created those agencies and many others following the Supreme Court's decision in Humphrey's Executor, assuming that they would operate with some degree of independence from the White House.

In an interview last fall with NPR, Slaughter said it was vital for the Supreme Court to preserve its independence.

"Independence allows the decision-making that is done by these boards and commissions to be on the merits, about the facts, and about protecting the interests of the American people," she said. "That is what Americans deserve from their government."

James M. Burnham, an attorney who has served in both Trump administrations, offered the counter view, arguing that Congress' limits on the president's removal powers have been unconstitutional from the beginning.

"I don't think there is such a thing as an independent agency because everything has to be in one of the three branches of government," he argued. "I don't think they've ever been independent."
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