18 August 2025 PAUSD Board Meeting Comments
4 Open Forum
We have gone from 16 regular board meetings a year in 2022-23 to 12 this year. I don’t think this was intentional, but it should be a serious concern to everyone as transparency, oversight, and insight into district operations are lost first when we reduce the number of meetings. We should be targeting 2 board meetings a month when school is in session and this can be easily fixed by the board.
The board has substantial responsibilities to just “keep the lights on”. Budgets. Union negotiations. State mandated reporting. These all take a lot of time and it is non-negotiable. As we reduce the number of meetings, everything else gets squeezed out. Issues like our problem with 8th grade math, chronic absenteeism, and increase in suspensions never have the chance to be agendized. This denies our district team to present the work that they are doing and prevents the board from having insight and oversight into what is happening. It also can exacerbate political problems – salary reviews, curriculum matters, … simply because of the lack of space on the calendar. Board members can’t raise issues for discussion and the public wonders if problems are being worked or being ignored.
4A. Advanced Diploma
I hope that the district works on a suitable Advanced diploma option for our third high school – Middle College.
4B. Summer Projects
Wow… lots of work – how close are we to being done with the electrical / HVAC upgrades across the district?
5. Consent Agenda
General comment about “floaty data” – too often data is presented without context. No information is provided on what happened in the previous year or year to date. It makes it very hard to see whether the data we are seeing is significant or not. I suspect that board members are no better at this than I am… but perhaps I’m wrong.
C. I appreciate that Special Education Teachers are now listed as “Teachers” but it is no longer possible to track staffing changes. I have heard anecdotally that there has been a lot of turnover in the special education department this summer – it is no longer directly visible in the reports. I hope the board is sufficiently concerned with staff turnover to be interested in both what departments and schools to request this important information.
NOTE – I think (and can’t confirm) that we have had over 100% turnover in our mod-severe / extensive support needs teachers in middle school over the last two years… or very close to that. This is not about blaming people, but figuring out what is going on and what to do.
D. There was a whole lot of turnover in Classified staff in special education. I hope that the board is sufficiently concerned about turnover to request more data including what turnover looks like year over year.
F. We have 6 categories of principal salaries. Perhaps this should be revisited. JLS is as big as our high schools and, based on my brief experience, our Middle College principal has a very complicated job coordinating between two school systems.
K. NOTE … lease and lease terms not included, only cover letter.
M. College and Career Access Program – !!!!! NOTE TO ME – highlights some marginalized groups but not Disabled Students (state issue).
N. alternative programat Alta Vista Continuation High School … !!!! NOTE TO ME… what is this?
8. BUDGET
No comments, but good stuff to go through later !!!!!
9.B – Secondary Student Report
8th grade math continues to be a problem.
Greene Ds & Fs…. When is this going to be on the agenda to discuss? They have the most in the district yet are half the size of schools with even similar rates of Ds and Fs.
No reporting on non-passing grades for Students with Disabilities. 90% of students with disabilities get grades and we report on virtually every other demographic group in these reports.
This should be an agenda item for discussion! The math problem was present last year and never discussed and apparently so were some of these other issues. It looks like there was no meaningful improvement from Fall to Spring which raises concerns about the effectiveness of current interventions.
9E – Public Records
There are 4 open requests from 2022 to 2024… why?
