By: Isabela Koebel & Paolo Calchi Novati
The PUSD school board has been laying off staff since February due to massive budget cuts. Now that school consolidation is on the table, hundreds of employees all over the district could be impacted. Plans from Total School Solutions, the consultancy company that PUSD hired to help with budgeting, include three plans to close Blair High School and one plan to close Marshall. Although Marshall’s middle school will remain, its high school students would be transferred to another campus.
Although the district contracted with TSS, after a recent motion from the board, it has decided to reject the plan constructed by the consultancy company. And for the time being, consolidation has been tabled indefinitely. There seem to be no immediate plans for consolidation unless the board can offset recall notices to two of its members and still vote to consolidate. This seems highly unlikely.
Miguel Rodriguez, a counselor at Marshall whose position here has been cut, focuses on the students.
“Before I got into education, I was working for health insurance and all that for the private sector. So I understand when cuts have to happen, something’s got to give, somebody’s going to have to go. So I think it’s something that’s probably necessary in order for the district to get back on track with its budget,” said Rodriguez. “But what is going to have the biggest impact on the students? [School consolidation] just leaves more room for students to get lost in the shuffle, you know, those that don’t advocate as much as others do. Those are the ones that tend to get lost, or get the least help.”
PUSD has an average student-to-teacher ratio of 21:1, which may go up after school closures and teacher cuts.
Ivan Harris, a Multi-Tiered System of Supports Coach at Marshall whose position has also been cut by the district, focuses on the community the cuts are impacting.
“I just think that whatever information [the school board] has, they feel that is the best course to take. And so I always try to look at it from both sides. But I do not wish for any school to close because I know that students, parents, families, teachers, staff are all tied to whatever campus they belong to, and they love it,” Harris said, “I would be in favor of consolidation if they feel that it’s going to save, in a big picture, our district because of declining enrollment. After our recent tragedy with the Eaton Fire, we had a lot of families displaced and things like that. I would hate for us to see more families leave the district and leave our schools because I think we have a really good school district.”
Other teachers, such as Jessica Bilandzija-Maker, an English and Academy of Creative Industries teacher going on her tenth year at Marshall, expressed frustration with PUSD’s lack of a clear purpose for consolidation.
“I think it’s a hard conversation, but I think it’s also a conversation that could be like, ‘What are the benefits that come from it if we have a clear vision? What is it that you as students could actually gain from consolidating schools? What could teachers gain from consolidating schools? I don’t think we’ve ever been given a full clear vision of that. And if that were given, I think it would give people a lot of hope,’” Bilanzija-Maker said. “Nothing is permanent. Everything is temporary. Things change. So what are the benefits from the change?”
Recent developments have changed the consolidation decisions dramatically, however. On Monday, May 11, a ColoradoBoulevard.net article revealed that multiple Pasadena Board of Education members discussed school consolidation plans outside of board meetings. There are concerns that these communications were in violation of California’s Brown Act, and could impact consolidation decisions. Parents, teachers, and students have protested the board members in question being able to operate on the board.
Jeffrey Fletcher, a digital media teacher at Marshall and an advocate against consolidation, is no stranger to these protests.
“It seems like there are four Board members who are hell-bent on closing schools. They also seem to be favoring other schools to be saved from consolidation. Their whole process appears to be very biased, as if they had a predetermined outcome they are hoping for,” said Fletcher.
When asked about repercussions for the board members named in the article, Fletcher focused on the constituents.
“If they violated the Brown Act, they absolutely need to be held accountable. From everything we are discovering about their actions, the community no longer trusts them. They aren’t listening to these pleas from students and families,” said Fletcher.
Thurgood Marshall principal Lori Touloumian, who is opposed to consolidation, sees success in the people at Marshall.
“I feel like it is a testament to when you have a whole school community behind a cause that is something that we should be fighting for, that is super valuable,” said Touloumian. “You want students and parents and staff that love their school because that’s what sustains a school. And that’s what keeps us going. That speaks to our success in so many ways.”
The financial situation of the Pasadena Unified School District is, to say the least, a hot mess. Next school year, the district is predicted to face a budget deficit of $30 million dollars, which will require it to cut teachers, administrators, programs, and maybe even schools. The PUSD Board of Education is scheduled to decide which schools to consolidate (if any) on June 28, according to a PUSD press release.
At its Mar. 12, 2026 special meeting, the Board certified in its Second Interim Budget Report of 2025-26 that the district’s financial status is “positive”. According to Board Report No. 120-B, this means that PUSD should be able to fulfill its financial obligations for the 2025-26 fiscal year and the next two fiscal years.
This certification came just in time for a Mar. 16 deadline that the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) had set. Had the Board failed to prove its financial stability by this date, LACOE could have chosen an expert to take charge of PUSD’s financial decisions, thus taking away much of the Board’s power, according to Pasadena Now.
In order to avoid this county takeover, the Board took several drastic measures, including cutting $24.5 million from its budget in accordance with the recommendations of the Superintendent’s Budget Advisory Committee. One part of these reductions took place at the Board’s Feb. 26 meeting, in which it was decided that hundreds of district employees will be laid off or have their working hours reduced at the end of the 2025-26 school year.
Nine certificated staff and nine classified staff will be cut from Marshall. According to Cabotschools.org, certificated staff are those that need some sort of certificate or licence to do their jobs; this includes teachers and counselors. Meanwhile, classified staff do not need a certificate; examples are custodians, security guards, and secretaries.
According to multiple Marshall staff members, the certificated staff that Marshall will lose are: two counselors, one English teacher, one music teacher, one science teacher, two sixth grade teachers, and one physical education teacher.
The classified staff that will be cut or reduced at Marshall next year are: two custodians, three clerks, one secretary, two behavioral assistant project aids, and one bilingual assistant. This list is from District Resolution No. 2879, which was passed on Feb. 26. The people in these certificated and classified positions will be discharged or have reduced hours, even though their positions themselves may be filled with new people next school year.
According to District Resolution No. 2858, there are a total of 184 certificated staff districtwide that will be let go or have their hours reduced at the end of the year. Among these staff are 31 high school teachers, 31 MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) staff, and 14 special education staff.
At its Jan. 22 board meeting this year, in order to help it explore ways to increase financial stability, the PUSD Board of Education hired an independent consulting firm that specializes in education, Total School Solutions. PUSD Public Information Officer Hilda Horvath Ramirez said in a statement to the Eagle Eye that the district hired TSS as part of its commitment to an “unbiased process.”
However, an investigative article published by Colorado Boulevard on May 11 has severely undermined this claim. The article revealed that some school board members had meetings with TSS representatives about school consolidations early as 2025 (which is before the board hired TSS), which calls into question TSS’s neutrality about school consolidation. Furthermore, some parents were not pleased about how much money TSS is getting from the district: they signed a contract with PUSD worth $233,300, which one Blair parent called a “ridiculous sum”.
After multiple months of work, TSS presented the School Consolidation Advisory Committee (SCAC) with six proposals for closing or combining schools; they all were all rejected. SCAC is a committee made up of students, staff, parents, and community members created by the Board to advise it on school consolidation. Its decision is not final: it is only a recommendation for the Board of Education, which the Board can decide to listen to or not.