The Brief

The Pasadena Unified School District board voted 4-3 Thursday night to cut $24.5 million from next year’s budget by eliminating dozens of positions from schools and central administration.

The vote determined the lion’s share of the district’s planned $30.5 million budget reduction and represents about 16% of the district's $189 million projected general fund next school year.

“We are losing people that we care about and love,” Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco said. “I'm not going to deny that. But our programs are going to be different. They're still going to be here.”

Among the cuts are $17.2 million in librarians, teachers, gardeners and school office staff.

The board eliminated just over $5 million in district administration and canceled more than $2.2 million of contracted services such as professional development.

Though the majority of the board supported an amendment to make steeper cuts to administration and partially restore the athletics budget and several teaching positions, the split vote revealed competing visions of how to move the district forward with fewer resources.

“Overall in looking at these cuts, I'm still not sure exactly what we're doing wrong in our spending,” said board member Kimberly Kenne.

How did the community respond?

The district tasked a group of staff, parents, students, labor partners and community members with evaluating and ranking programs and positions to eliminate from schools.

As of Thursday, more than 1,000 people had signed an online petition urging the district leadership to reconsider the proposal. More than a hundred parents, educators and students filled the board’s chambers and two overflow rooms.

Many spoke in support of the programs and funding recommended for elimination, including arts, science, athletics and librarians.

Lyric Mims, left, is a junior in Thurgood Marshall Secondary School’s Academy for Creative Industries and attended Thursday's board meeting, along with dozens of other students, educators and parents.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Pasadena High School sophomore Cory Collins-Lopez said he considered going to a charter school during his freshman year.

“I felt like I was just going to the school and not really belonging there,” Collins-Lopez said. But that feeling changed after playing for the water polo and swim teams.

“Those sports have been a very major factor in my enjoyment and sense of belonging at the school at this current moment,” Collins-Lopez said.

Pasadena Unified competes for students with dozens of local private and charter schools. The proliferation of private schools dates to the 1970s, when white families fled the district to evade desegregation.

Parent Gina Cohen said she pulled two of her five children from PUSD schools to access more special education services and arts programs.

“I would love for my children to stay in this district, but we are being pushed out one talent, interest and special need at a time,” Cohen said.

What are the details of the final plan?

After more than an hour and a half of discussion, the board altered the district’s recommendations and:

• Restored about six career and technical education teachers at the district’s high schools. 
• Reduced cuts to athletics by more than a half-million dollars, with each high school eliminating between $100,000 and $143,000 based on student enrollment. 
• Increased central office cuts from $3.6 million and about 28 positions to $5.1 million and 38 positions. 

The teachers union estimated layoffs for about 40 educators, including science and arts teachers.

Jonathan Gardner, United Teachers of Pasadena president, urged the board to cut more administrative positions during Thursday's meeting.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Library services across the district will be reduced to part time.

“Middle school libraries, in particular, are designed to get kids joyfully reading and writing and we do,” said Octavia E. Butler Magnet librarian Natalie Daily. “But it takes being there every day.”

For example, Butler has held a science-fiction festival inspired by the school’s namesake, a PUSD alumna, for the past four years.

Also among the layoffs are dozens of members from unions representing school support staff, including custodians, security guards and the gardeners who helped restore campuses after the Eaton Fire.

A student at the 2024 Octavia E. Butler Library Science Fiction Festival. “It's just ways for kids to be engaged in both science and art and creation,” librarian and organizer Natalie Daily said of the event at the time.

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Julie Leopo

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LAist

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Cuts to athletics would be spread across high schools. Previously, district staff predicted that schools would have to eliminate some of their teams.

John Muir High School Athletic Director Alfredo Resendiz said the change will allow the school to preserve its 17 athletic programs, though teams will likely play fewer games and need to do more fundraising.

“ We're gonna be working overtime during the Thanksgiving break [at] all sites to make sure that we get those numbers and keep as many teams as possible while trying to offer the full athletic experience for every student athlete," Resendiz said.

Impact to the central office

Ahead of the vote Thursday, many parents expressed concerns that schools shouldered too much of the burden, as opposed to central administration.

While the board ultimately decreased the central office budget, nearly half of the board’s members voted against the amendment.

All expressed reservations about eliminating additional central office positions, which include people responsible for payroll, curriculum development, the special education department and the educational channel, KLRN, which broadcasts the board meetings and other district events.

District staff said it was unclear how these responsibilities would be redistributed to school sites.

“It's just hard to conceive burdening a system that's already burdened and still being able to bring our best to our classrooms,” said board member Michelle R. Bailey.

How did PUSD get to this point?

For the past several years, PUSD has spent more money than it brings in.

One factor is that PUSD, like many districts in the region, is enrolling fewer students, and the state funds schools based on average daily attendance.

“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, said at Thursday’s meeting. “Despite your best efforts and intentions, the district has not been able to live within its means.”

LACOE has warned that without significant reductions in spending, the district will not be able to meet its financial obligations and risks losing the ability to govern itself. He said the district is projected to have $149.4 million of deficit spending between 2025 and 2028.

“This is not a temporary shortfall,” Castelo said. “It's a structural crisis.”

The board must now submit a fiscal report to the county in the beginning of December. Layoff notices related to the cuts would be issued by March 2026 and the changes would take effect next school year.

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Beyond the Rose Bowl and historic bungalows, Pasadena has stranger tales to tell. David Kalbeitzer has been seeking out those stories where rocket science meets the occult and ghosts haunt the city’s grandest buildings.

For Kalbeitzer, a Disney executive who investigates the paranormal in his free time, his fascination with the city’s mysterious side started when he bought a Victorian north of Old Town.

He sensed a spirit at the open house a dozen years ago and took it as a reason to move his family to Pasadena. Then he started learning the city’s history.

David Kalbeitzer, a paranormal investigator from Pasadena, is giving a talk about the city's strange history Saturday night in Old Town.

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Courtesy of David Kalbeitzer

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“I realized, ‘Oh, this place called us just as much as we were looking for it,’” he said.

On Saturday night, he’s sharing the lore he’s collected at Mesmer Mesmer an Old Town shop and event space. While the event is full, there’s a waitlist, and more talks featuring Kalbeitzer are in the works.

A city of ghost stories 

Ask Kalbeitzer about haunted Pasadena, and the list stretches from alleyways to the Colorado Street Bridge to Castle Green, the turreted former hotel overlooking Central Park.

“The Pasadena Playhouse theater is, you know, very haunted,” he added.

He says playgoers have reported hearing disembodied voices.

Theatergoers over the years have described hearing voices and seeing apparitions at the Pasadena Playhouse.

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Jeff Lorch

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Courtesy of Pasadena Playhouse

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“And you look, and there’s no one there, or apparitions that have been seen sort of standing in the corner, and then you walk up, and they kind of disappear,” he said.

As for the spirit that helped draw him to his current Pasadena home?

Kalbeitzer says she’s still around — and his psychic friend Michael Kouri shared her name: Dolores.

“It’s actually haunted by a very kind ghost that looks out for the house, protects my family and has been able to activate our alarm,” he said.

Having a Dolores in the house might send some people running, but Kalbeitzer said he grew up in a haunted house in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

And when his family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a teenage Kalbeitzer started seeking out places known for paranormal activity.

Rocket science, ritual magic and mind-reading

Having lived in different neighborhoods in L.A., Kalbeitzer says there’s something uniquely otherworldly about Pasadena — and it goes beyond ghost stories.

He said the city has an energy that draws people exploring the unknown, perhaps most famously Jack Parsons.

The rocket pioneer who helped launch the Jet Propulsion Laboratory also practiced ritual magic at his Pasadena home with the likes of L. Ron Hubbard before he founded Scientology.

“Many people call it the occult. I don’t know that I fully subscribe to that, but there is spiritualism and occult mixed in there,” Kalbeitzer said.

Then there was Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, whose interests while living in Pasadena extended to telepathy and séances.

Upton Sinclair, pictured with his wife Mary Craig Sinclair in 1935, several years after he published a book examining her reported telepathy.

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Los Angeles Times via Wikimedia Commons

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In 1930, Sinclair published Mental Radio, a book about experiments in mind-reading. Albert Einstein provided a preface. Yes, that Einstein, who would spend the following winter at Caltech expanding on the theories of relativity and cosmology.

“Like it’s the craziest mixture of things that were happening at that time and all of it at the same time,” Kalbeitzer said.

A presence in the shop 

The event couldn’t have found a more appropriate venue.

Since opening five months ago in Old Town, Mesmer Mesmer has embraced the dark and mysterious, offering tarot and crystal readings and hosting events on subjects such as hip-hop’s relationship with ghosts.

Tyke O'Brien opened her shop Mesmer Mesmer earlier this year to create a third space and offer books and esoterica alongside clothing.

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Tyke O'Brien

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At that event, a medium told owner Tyke O’Brien she could sense a presence in the shop, which formerly housed a bridal store.

“She goes, ‘Do you ever feel it?’” O’Brien recounted, “And I’m like, ‘I am such a bummer. I really wish I could. How wonderful would that be to be able to?’”

The same can be said for this writer who’s lived and worked in and around Pasadena for years without so much as a brush with the otherworldly.

Kalbeitzer, on the other hand, reports supernatural encounters all around town.

“I think that how you see yourself in the world has a lot more to do with it, and whether you want to have those experiences,” he said.

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027. 

At a community meeting Thursday night at MacArthur Park Elementary School, officials said fence installation is now expected to continue through fall 2027, overshooting the previously announced spring 2027 completion date.

Thursday’s meeting highlighted the divide over the city’s plan to fence off MacArthur Park, with tensions rising during public comment. The Los Angeles Police Department says the fence will make drug enforcement easier, while some in the community who volunteer around the park questioned whether it will improve safety enough to justify the cost.

The city has allocated $2.3 million for the project, but officials have not said whether that will cover the full cost.

Installation of the green metal fence around the park’s perimeter is expected to begin in November and take about a year. A second phase, adding decorative elements to the fence, is planned for fall and winter 2027. Officials said the schedule could change because of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

The park is expected to remain open during construction.

Capt. Ben Fernandes with the LAPD’s Rampart Division said the fence would create a barrier along Alvarado Street and other areas where officers have seen people using narcotics. That would allow police to focus more of their enforcement efforts inside the park, he said.

“So if people are going deeper into the park to use, that’ll make it easier for us to go in and do enforcement on them and arrest them for that use,” Fernandes said. 

MacArthur Park will close every night once an 8-foot-tall fence goes up around the green space, with Los Angeles police officers sweeping the park for encampments and people sleeping there before the gates shut. The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved the plan Thursday.

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LA Recreation and Parks

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“I’ve been an officer for 29 years, and I’ve always known I can go buy drugs there, and I did as a narcotics officer. So what I’m saying is, we are trying to make it not convenient,” he added. 

Fernandes also said the city plans to enhance the park’s existing camera network. LAPD officers and Los Angeles Park Rangers will be able to monitor the cameras from their respective stations, he said. City officials are still evaluating whether additional cameras will be needed to address blind spots in the park after construction is complete.

Ariana Walker, who visits MacArthur Park every Saturday with a group of friends who pool their own resources to distribute food and hygiene kits, questioned whether the city had shown that the fence would improve safety and how much it would cost to maintain.

“The fence is a $2.3 million fence at the base level,” she said. “And they haven’t given us any indication of how much more it’s going to cost for upkeep, to keep anybody safe. There’s no conclusive evidence that a fence is going to stop crime the way that they’re suggesting.”

The meeting grew tense when John Alle, a local property owner whose family owns the building that houses Langer’s Delicatessen across the street from the park, objected to having his comments read from a written comment card rather than speaking directly to officials. Alle has been a vocal critic of the city’s response to drug activity and public safety concerns around MacArthur Park.

He was allowed to comment during the meeting and said the city needs to take a tougher approach to drug use and sales around the park. 

“We see knife attacks at all hours of the day. It’s out of control. And it’s not gotten any better,” he said. “We want to bring it back to where it was 15 or 20 years ago.”

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027.

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Gary Coronado

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The LA Local

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Alle pointed to public events at the park, including an upcoming Día de los Muertos celebration and a Labor Day weekend picnic hosted by Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman as positive developments for the space. But he added those events do not reflect conditions throughout the park.

Officials also outlined other planned improvements, including restoring access through the tunnels connecting the park’s north and south sides, making accessibility upgrades and providing free Wi-Fi for parkgoers. 

Residents who want to provide input on the fence’s decorative elements can email admin@themorcosgroup.com or call (310) 479-4727 for more information.

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