Pasadena Board of Education Sets 4 Priorities for Upcoming School Year

The Pasadena Board of Education established a list of four general priorities for the upcoming school year during its annual retreat, which took place online over the weekend.

Each of the board’s seven members was asked to contribute two priorities, which were merged and organized into the four basic priorities, District 7 Board Member Scott Phelps said. Superintendent Brian McDonald also submitted three.

One priority is “meeting the needs of the most struggling students — and staff, who are struggling, too — during remote [learning] in the spring,” said Phelps.

Planning for the reopening of campuses for in-person learning was also among the priorities, Phelps said, although the timeline is contingent on factors including the course of the pandemic, decisions by public health officials and union negotiations.

The third priority will be “coming up with a five-year plan for the fiscal health of the school district,” he said.

The fourth priority set out by the board revolved around better measuring student outcomes, and applying that knowledge to improve them, he said.

The gathering was productive, according to Phelps.

“It was a very good process of talking about each one of those [priorities], the board members explaining why they submitted theirs,” he said. “And then the facilitator was able to group them.”

“I feel good about the commitment of the board to give direction to the superintendent, clear direction,” Phelps said. “It’s very important that the board acts with one voice.

“The whole purpose of this retreat was to try to give a few priorities to the superintendent, so he could align everything with those priorities and he could then direct staff,” he said. “I think we’re going to have a follow-up to come up with ways of following up on those priorities.”

Newly elected District 2 Board Member Jennifer Hall Lee said she felt the retreat went “extremely well.”

“We had set up and we achieved our goals, which was to give the superintendent goals to work on,” she said. “And we all had a great opportunity to air our concerns and our goals based on many different things, including listening to people and reading through data. And we really worked through a lot of problems in a timely manner. I was extremely pleased with how everything went.

“It was my first retreat and I learned a lot, and I think we might even have another one in February because we have some more issues to deal with,” Hall Lee said. “It gives us the opportunity to discuss things that we are not able to discuss in our regular meetings because there’s so much business to take care of. It gives us a little bit more wiggle room in which we can learn from one another, and we all bring something new to the table.”

The retreat also gave board members a chance to better understand one another, she said.

“That’s really important on a school board. We’re individuals, but we work as a team. So in order to get to that place, we need to understand who we are as people, and to really get into the details of what each of us brings individually.”