What is PEF?

On Wednesday, I invited the pasadenaschools.info email list to surf over to my BOE opinions on this blog. Readers will recall that in my summary of current BOE election leanings, I alluded to at least two of the three seats having candidates with close affiliations to PEF.

Drawing this correlation, elicited comments from "neal" (no last name provided) and sparked a thread on pasadenaschools.info.

Both discussions are highly recommended reading.

Tip: Yahoo Groups threads can be traversed chronologically by clicking "next message" and "prev message" at the top and bottom of each post, or you may use the thread "tree" at the bottom of each message to hop around.

Some BOE feedback

Some people are shy. Some people may have conflicts of interest. Whatever the reason, here are some worthwhile comments from people who emailed me but requested anonymity:

Anon: Why is being a current PUSD parent more important than being a public school parent, in general. Just being a PUSD parent doesn’t make you qualified to be on the Board. I think that you need a solid understanding of the education field, otherwise, you just become another bureaucrat telling teachers how they should teach. Don’t you think that it’s beneficial to have a background in education, as well as thorough understanding of the complicated social issues in Pasadena?

Me: True being a current PUSD parent in and of itself is not enough, but still it's a heavy plus for me. Proves a commitment to these schools and this community. Especially Harrison whose last 2 kids of 5 are almost through with high school.

Debating BOE over lunch with Isaac

So Isaac Garcia, Steve Gerow and I went to lunch on Yesterday and compared notes. Here are our early returns:

Isaac
Seat 2: Mastromatteo (very involved PUSD parent)
Seat 4: Bibbiani (incumbent; often a dissenting voice)
Sear 6: Martinez (community leader with a diverse perspective)

Jeremiah
Seat 2: Mastromatteo (very involved PUSD parent)
Seat 4: Harrison (very involved PUSD parent; associated with PEF)
Sear 6: Martinez (community leader with a diverse perspective)

Steve
abstained

Capsule summary of discussion:

Picking three for PUSD BOE

So March 6th, Altadena, Sierra Madre and Pasadena vote for three new PUSD BOE memebers.

League of Women Voters lists the candidates for seats two, four, and six, although the candidate information is pretty sparse there.

PEN (Pasadena Education Network) has been collecting and publishing information for a month already, and despite their election info presentation being a bit crude, the information is very comprehensive, so worth suffering the mashup of pdfs and awkward html. (In fairness, their web site has come a long way in the last couple years and at least the Microsoft Word docs are all been published as pdfs these days).

Update, Tuesday, Feb 13: I just visited the PEN website, and they have created a nicely updated election info page. The old content is still there for now, but you can see the new content by visiting the homepage or going to www.penfamilies.org/election