Guest Opinion | Jonathan Gardner: Pasadena Unified School District Students Deserve the Best Teachers

For decades, in Pasadena area politics, there has been an undercurrent of feelings about some of our students which needs to be called out and remedied.

Following the decades of white flight after the Supreme Court busing decisions along with the rhetoric that has been invoked to block prior parcel tax efforts to invest in PUSD students, we need to turn a final page on that past and chart a new path forward.

EVERY student that lives in the Pasadena USD boundaries deserves the highest quality education. And the best way to ensure such, as study after study has shown, is to prioritize the classroom in the budget, represented in reasonable class sizes and fair pay for teachers.

A recent OpEd tried to claim that the improvements that Pasadena Unified has made in its salaries since 2022 were somehow a waste of money. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The average (mean) pay for Pasadena Unified teachers in 2022 was $75,000, compared to the $85,000 average for Los Angeles area workers with Bachelor’s degrees. This PUSD average represented amongst the lowest salaries in the county in every category published yearly in the Los Angeles County School District Salary survey. For example, a 9th year PUSD teacher, with a BA and 60 post-baccalaureate units (the equivalent of two years of graduate study), was being paid $12,000 below market rate.

Most of our newer UTP educators struggle to afford housing near Pasadena and many drive 30 minutes to an hour or more to come educate our students. Even with the substantial and welcome increases over the last three years, some UTP teachers with Bachelor’s degrees are not even earning $40k. There is still important work to be done to fairly compensate the hard-working teachers.

These last two years, through the benefit of tax-payer-supported Measure J, and UTP-endorsed candidates, PUSD students are finally being prioritized by the current PUSD administration.

In order to keep the trend of solid PUSD Board candidates being elected, I urge you to continue to vote for United Teachers of Pasadena’s endorsed candidates.

These will steer the PUSD ship toward competence and student outcomes, away from the past couple of decades of focus on central administrator careers.

We are now at a crucial juncture, and we do not need to heed the call of those trying to drag PUSD back to its past.

In addition, to tangibly demonstrate that Pasadena Unified School District area voters believe that EVERY child in our boundaries deserves a high quality education, I urge you to vote in favor of the thoughtfully crafted parcel tax being placed on the ballot this November.

It will continue the work begun by Measure J in fully embracing ALL school children in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre.

Jonathan Gardner is the President of the United Teachers of Pasadena