12/01/2025
The Pasadena Unified School District Is In Trouble
The Cuts Are Coming. Pasadena Must Decide Who It Wants To Be.
The Blues According to Brother Yusef
Pasadena Unified is in trouble. Everyone can feel it. The Board has approved more than twenty four million in cuts, and more may follow. Librarians. Teachers. Office workers. Gardeners. Arts and athletic programs. Counseling support. The list is not short, and nothing about it feels minor. The numbers say one thing. The lived impact will say another.
I keep hearing people speak about this as if it is only a budget problem. A matter of simple math. Less money in. Less money going out. But public education is not a balance sheet. It is a living thing. A community vessel. A memory of who we are and who we want our children to become. When you strip away pieces of that vessel, you are not just cutting services. You are cutting identity, and you are cutting belonging.
I came of age inside PUSD. Back then we had options. Graphic arts. Industrial arts. Boys chorus. After school programs with life in them. Sports and drama and cooking classes. Spaces where a kid could explore who they were, even if they did not yet know it themselves. I was also a product of Pasadena’s integration era, when the district was trying, however imperfectly, to create shared space for everybody. Maybe it was a better economy. Maybe it was a more progressive moment. Maybe we valued children differently. Whatever it was, those programs shaped me — and shaped many others like me.
That is why these cuts worry me. When programs fade. When libraries lose staff. When arts collapse. For some children those are extras. Nice if the budget allows. For others they are a lifeline. A reason to come to school. A place to be seen and to dream. When those supports disappear, the gaps widen. Students with means will find other options. Students without means will be told to make do with less. And we know who falls into that second group more often. We know who loses the most when opportunity becomes optional.
This moment calls for honesty. The district must balance its books. The county is watching. The numbers are real. But the question we face is not only about solvency. It is about values. What does Pasadena want public education to be? A bare minimum academic delivery system, or a place where young people grow with joy, culture, support, and a future that feels reachable?
We cannot pretend this storm hits everyone the same. It does not. It strikes the children who depend on public schools the most. Many of those children are Black and brown. Many come from working families with limited choices. When we cut, we must say out loud who is bleeding.
Pasadena can still choose. It can look at this crisis and shrink, or it can decide that survival is not enough. A district can live on paper while dying in spirit. Our schools deserve more than survival.
Our children deserve more than survival.
If we forget that, we lose more than programs. We lose the promise of public education itself.
