Residents Rally to Keep School in West Pasadena

West Pasadena residents expressed their displeasure that Pasadena Unified intends to close the only remaining elementary school in their neighborhood and pushed for alternatives to keep the school open at Monday night’s meeting of the district’s Unified’s 7-11 Committee.

Pasadena Unified has been proposing various options for San Rafael Elementary School’s future since earthquake faults were discovered running under the campus in 2009.

Last November, the Board of Education decided to relocate the school to the former Allendale Elementary School campus near Blair High School.

Instead, the West Pasadena Resident Association wants the Board to reconsider constructing new buildings on the school’s site which are sufficiently set-back from the faults to be legal or to relocate the school to the vacant Linda Vista Elementary School campus.

“Other options are feasible to avoid closing the last public school in west Pasadena,” the Association said in an email on Friday, and went on to encourage the Board of Education “to give those options very serious consideration.”

The Linda Vista-Annandale Association has also asked the Board to reopen Linda Vista Elementary School as a public school.

“We think it’s shameful that they’re trying to close the last school in the area,” WPRA President Bill Urban said Saturday. Citing what he said were the school’s improving academic results, Urban said “It seems like it would be a huge victory for Pasadena Unified School District except they’re going to close the school.”

“It just seems like such a shame that we essentially pack up and leave such an important area of the city,” area representative Councilmember Steve Madison said at a recent joint meeting of the City Council and the Board.“I’d like us to put on our thinking caps to figure out some way we don’t just cut off a fifth of the city geographically.”

Neighborhood schools used to dot Madison’s west Pasadena District Six, the largest geographic area of Pasadena, but with the planned closure of San Rafael Elementary the number will dwindle to zero.

The seismic safety issue first arose almost five years ago after residents approved modernization of campus structures at the school as part of the Measure TT Bond Construction Program.

By 2012, the district had generated various options for the school’s future. The district’s analyses, from its first report, always concluded that the two options to keep the school in west Pasadena advocated by area residents were the most expensive.

“The problem seems to be money,” observed resident Prioscialla Taylor in an opinion piece published in the Pasadena Star-News. “Why not sell or lease some of the other school properties which have already been closed in Pasadena and use those surplus funds to add to the funds that would have to be spent to renovate, accommodate and bus the children across the city if they are moved?”

Pasadena Unified has “an awful lot of other sources of funding,” Urban said. “They’ve got a lot of property they own they’re not using that just sits there, or they have some low-income rental use of them. If they sold one of their properties they’ve got they could easily fund replacing that school. Those are the kinds of things we want to talk to them about.”