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Teachers, parents and students press Pasadena board over cuts, charter renewal and arsenic at San Rafael field
Summary
Community speakers including principals, teachers, union leaders and elementary students urged trustees to protect school programs amid proposed cuts, argued for reconsidering MTSS consolidations, urged the board to approve Odyssey Charter South's renewal, and demanded answers about arsenic testing at San Rafael's soccer field.
A steady stream of public commenters used the board’s three-minute public-comment periods to urge trustees to reconsider cuts to school supports, endorse charter renewal requests and demand clarity around environmental testing at school fields.
Odyssey South leaders — including Principal Bonnie Brimaccom and assistant principal Don Wrangle — presented the charter-renewal case, citing steady academic growth, social-emotional programming and enrollment resilience despite relocations prompted by the Eaton Fire. Relle Martinez (interim executive director of OCS South) expressed gratitude for the district partnership and asked the board to approve a seven-year renewal.
Teachers and school staff voiced sharply different concerns. Normakums second-grade teacher Barbara Ashida said combining the MTSS instructional coach with a wellness coach had created an impossible workload and warned that cuts to MTSS positions would harm classroom supports. Union speakers including representatives of the California School Employees Association and other groups urged the board to reconsider deep staffing reductions and to consider alternate savings such as capping contracted services or reducing central-office positions.
San Rafael elementary students gave emotional testimony about safety and play opportunities after arsenic testing closed their grass field: a fifth grader asked trustees, "Please tell me something to make me not scared," and described injuries playing on cracked blacktop. The board acknowledged the concern and indicated environmental testing and remediation steps were underway in other agenda items, but no immediate timetable for new testing or remediation was offered in the public comments segment.
Board response: trustees thanked speakers, asked staff follow-up questions and recorded the comments into the permanent meeting record. Several trustees invited staff to coordinate site visits, review the financial assumptions behind personnel changes and report back on remediation and safety timelines.
Next steps: the board considered charter renewals and later approved a seven-year renewal for Odyssey Charter South as part of the consent agenda. The district agreed to include public-comment emails in the permanent meeting file and asked staff to provide written follow-up where appropriate.
