Publications

Winter 2005 Newsletter

Pasadena Schools & City Collaborate On New Joint-Use Primary Center

School districts and cities too often operate independently, as within silos, when making capitol investment in public facilities. But, the City and school district of Pasadena are proving themselves exceptional as they collaboratively explore creating a new community-centered, mixed-use, family friendly school facility. With NSBN's assistance, they are working closely together to launch a community conversation about the best location for a new joint-use school in NW Pasadena. NSBN is pleased to present an interview with Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard, PUSD Superintendent Dr. Percy Clark, and Assistant Superintendent Eva Lueck in which they discuss their joint planning.

Superintendent Clark, what about the challenges and opportunities of building schools in Northwest Pasadena led you to form these relationships with the city and NSBN?

Percy Clark: There is nothing like new facilities to create excitement about education. Older buildings have a great deal of warmth, but sometimes they do not accommodate the new technology that is necessary to accomplish some of the things we are trying to do in this school district. So, a new facility brings a new excitement from staff, parents, and community. We have an excellent opportunity to build a school that I think will create an incredible amount of excitement in Northwest Pasadena.

There hasn't been a new school facility in that area in many years, even though the majority of children in the Pasadena Unified School District live in Northwest Pasadena. This project gives us the opportunity to create a neighborhood school within walking distance of our highest student population density. With the cooperation and the involvement of the community, it is going to be, I think, a real home run.

Mayor Bogaard, typically cities are uninvolved in schools and school facilities, but Pasadena has made itself a very special, unique place. What is the nature of the city's involvement in this collaboration?

Bill Bogaard: The city is convinced that cooperation with the school district is in the interest of the young people of our community, is in the interest of the public schools, and is in the interest of the community as a whole. We want to be a partner of the school district and to facilitate their programs, their initiatives, and their ultimate successes.

Eva, you are the point person helping the district and the city to manage this community engagement and collaborative planning process. What are the primary challenges and opportunities, as you see them?

Eva Lueck: One of our largest challenges is to find the perfect spot that will work for mixed use and our students, and then to look at how we can accomplish that with minimal impact to those that may need to relocate, and yet in the end have a project that everybody can support and buy into. I think that it is an exciting challenge, but it is a challenge because of all of the funding and timing issues.

Pasadena has built joint-use schools in the past. Mayor Bogaard, given both precedents, and NW's density and changing demographics, what are the benefits for the city from this project-specific relationship with the Pasadena Unified School District?

BB: We start with a conviction that our community will be enhanced by the presence of a school, and we believe that collaboration between the school and the city is a very promising approach. The city manager has sent out inquiries to a number of organizations in the city that indicate our intention to pursue, jointly with the school district, a school site that will include, if at all possible, another community activity. It might be a nonprofit. It could conceivably be a recreational facility, a mini-park, which would complement the school site. It could be a city or a county office. We are open to a variety of joint-uses. Some are coming into focus more than others at this point, but no final decision has been made. First we need a site, second we need to see the design for the schools, and then third we will tie in a joint community use if at all possible.

Superintendent, community engagement is part of Pasadena's culture, and an extensive outreach effort has already begun here. How does that play into the school board's planning?

PC: It is absolutely imperative. Anything that is done in Pasadena must have total community involvement. There have been a lot of conversations over the last several years. I think that our Northwest community has felt that we haven't been as attentive to them as we have in some other parts of the district. But, I think that feeling has developed because up until this point, we've had a lot of rhetoric and a lot of conversation, but we haven't seen action. Now we are starting to see action, and I think that is very pleasing to our Northwest neighborhood.

There is no vacant land in Pasadena; one can't just take a strawberry field and put a school or park on it. At the same time, school districts are called upon to build more seats and not necessarily to revitalize neighborhoods by building mixed-use developments. What are the obstacles to collaboratively building new joint-use schools, including finding property and securing funding?

PC: Well, it is in some ways a jigsaw puzzle at a really high level of difficulty because any land is in high demand, more so the bigger the parcel and the better the location. Mixed-use projects, I think, offer more possibilities because they bring other players to the table in support. All of our communities and our community associations are very involved with whathappens with property near or close to residential areas, so any project has to be palatable with community desires. The more we bring in joint-uses, the more it might be palatable.

In other words, we hope that if we offer a school and something else like park space, the community will see it fitting into that amount of land. We have to create a win-win situation in every aspect for a project to happen, and that is why I think that it is so important that all of us are cooperating. If we were trying to move this school ahead without the city and without mixed-use, I think it would probably take fifty years to get it done. So, for us to be able to do it, it takes this kind of cooperation.

What is the timeline for this project if all the benchmarks are met and a site is found? How tough will it be to accomplish your communal goals?

PC: Very optimistically, I would say 2007, but it is more realistic to say 2008. We are a mature city for all intents and purposes. Maybe some would view us as a small city, but we are built-out. How can we find that magic parcel of land where everybody agrees that, yes, children should go to school here, and there are also other uses. It is as difficult as anything I have ever participated in. I truly believe that without a relationship with the city and without joint-use, it will never happen. School districts tend to sometimes see themselves as the "lone ranger" in finding land and building schools, but that will never work in a built-out city.

Mayor Bogaard, you have been a leader in the League of California Cities. There has not been, however, much coordination between the League and the California School Boards Association in the crafting of school bond measures, or for park bonds, or library bonds. There are really few incentives for cities and school districts and others to cooperate. How might we break down the bureaucratic silos that undermine most joint-use efforts?

BB: It has been a difficult climate in Sacramento for cooperation between schools and cities, because each side views the other as competition for a limited amount of resources, and some of the solutions that have been adopted in recent years seem unbalanced to one or the other side. So, it will take leadership, and maybe a restructured fiscal system that removes the competitive aspects between schools and cities.

Hopefully, the approval of Proposition 1A in November will give cities greater confidence to think in long-term ways about building better communities. Fortunately, in Pasadena our economy has been quite stable through the last five years, and we are committed to continue a tradition of long-term planning. I would hope that there would be some leadership from Sacramento and the Office of Planning and Research to further support thoughtful, long-term, and efficient planning by local governments.

I think that NSBN is proving, in neighborhood after neighborhood, the benefits that can come from cooperation and a commitment to the effective use of limited resources. I hope that lesson can carry statewide.

In discussions about this school project, we have not only talked about district demographics today, but also the possible demand if the schools were perceived by the wider community as meeting their needs. Can healthy neighborhood schools meet those needs and bring students back to Pasadena Unified School District from private and parochial schools?

PC: No question, you have got to have that outstanding neighborhood school. For more than 40 years, Pasadena Unified has operated under a very strict busing order. We were creating schools based primarily on racial considerations, but that race geography doesn't exist anymore in our school district. We are starting to move away from that in creating neighborhood schools. By building a strong neighborhood school, we are also giving other people choices if they are not satisfied with their schools. At our kindergarten, first, second, and primary schools, people who would not normally have looked at this school district are starting to come into the district.

We are seeing a demographic shift, presently at its very early beginning, that I think will yield more students over time, even though there is a decline right now. People who were almost 100 percent attracted to private schools are starting to look at our public schools. Over the next five years, I think that we are going to see an increase in students on balance.

BB: Pasadena is proud of its heritage of diversity, and it seems that heritage is being reinforced every month in Southern California today. Between 1990 and the year 2000, there was a 10 to 15 percent increase in the number of persons with Latino heritage who reside in Pasadena. We think that in broad terms, notwithstanding the city's active effort to increase the production of affordable housing, that the average income in our community will be higher ten years from now than it is today because of the cost of housing. We expect it still to be very diverse. Pasadena is known as a diverse community. It is embracing to persons of all backgrounds, and I don't anticipate there to be dramatic changes in the population that we have today, which is over one-third Latino, 10 or 12 percent African American, 8 or 10 percent persons of Asian background, and constituencies in the community of Armenian Americans and Muslim Americans as well.

Given that NSBN is funded by First 5 LA, how are the demands by families in NW Pasadena for family resource centers, preschools, and child care influencing the collaborative planning for a new Primary Center?

EL: We know that the needs of children 0 to 5 are a concern, and we share it. We are already building a preschool model into our plans, but we are also going out into our community to ask them what they would like to see in the center. It may very well be to serve that 0 to 5 range.

PC: We have got a group called the Pasadena Education Network that is just doing a tremendous job. It includes almost 300 families, the preponderance of which are preschool parents. They schedule tours and run programs to promote our public schools to our future customer base. It is much more difficult once a youngster starts in something other than a public school, and then try to convince them to come to our school district. That is the future of this school district, so we need to cover it.

Is there any reason that we shouldn't change public policy: giving school districts the duty to define the need, and the city authority to build new schools?

BB: Getting cities involved in a more aggressive entitlement process for schools strikes me as very worthwhile, whether we have a role in actually doing the building or making certain that it happens in some way that takes advantage of cities' leverage.