Patrick Cahalan

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Patrick Cahalan

Prior offices

Pasadena Unified School District school board District 4

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Education

Bachelor's

Loyola Marymount University

Graduate

Claremont Graduate University

Ph.D

Claremont Graduate University

Personal

Profession

Technical operations manager

Contact

Personal website

Patrick Cahalan represents District 4 on the Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education in California. He was first elected to the board in the primary election on March 10, 2015. He defeated one fellow challenger to win his seat.

Cahalan participated in Ballotpedia's 2015 survey of school board candidates. His responses can be found under "Campaign themes."

Biography

Email editor@ballotpedia.org to notify us of updates to this biography.

Cahalan has worked for the California Institute of Technology since 2002. He is the manager of technical operations for the computational and mathematical sciences department. He previously worked as director of curriculum and technology at Loyola High School. Cahalan currently serves as chair of the Neighborhood Crisis Management Committee for Bungalow Heaven Neighborhood Association, as vice chairperson of the Pasadena Unified School District Advisory Council for School Site Councils and as chairperson of the Longfellow Elementary School Site Council. He is also an assistant coach with the Brotherhood Community Youth Sports League.

Cahalan earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Loyola Marymount University and his master's degree in information systems from Claremont Graduate University. He is currently working on his doctoral degree in information systems and technology from Claremont Graduate University. Cahalan and his wife have two children who attend the Pasadena Unified School District.

Elections

2015

See also: Pasadena Unified School District elections (2015)

Three of the seven board seats on the Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education were up for primary election on March 10, 2015. A general election would have been held on April 21, 2015, if no candidate had received a majority of the vote.

The incumbents from Districts 2, 4 and 6 were up for re-election, but none of them filed to run. Three candidates, Roy Boulghourjian, Evan Dagger and Marcela Rojas, filed to run for the District 2 seat. The District 4 election featured candidates Patrick Cahalan and Sheryl Turner. Candidates Sandra J. Siraganian and Lawrence Torres ran for the District 6 seat. Boulghourjian, Cahalan and Torres won election to their seats in the primary election. Each received more than 50 percent of the votes cast in their districts.

This election was the first time the seats from Districts 2, 4 and 6 were elected by district. Prior to 2012, board members represented a specific seat but were elected at-large. The seats from Districts 1, 3, 5 and 7 switched to by-district elections in 2013.

Results

Pasadena Unified School District, District 4 Primary Election, 4-year term, 2015
Party		Candidate	Vote %	Votes
	Nonpartisan	Patrick Cahalan	56%	968
	Nonpartisan	Sheryl Turner	44%	760
Total Votes				1,728
Source: Pasadena City Clerk, "Election Results: PUSD," accessed March 20, 2015

Funding

Cahalan reported $10,357.00 in contributions and $5,949.20 in expenditures to the Pasadena City Clerk’s Office, which left his campaign with $4,407.80 as of March 6, 2015.

Endorsements

Cahalan received endorsements from the following individuals and organizations:

• United Teachers of Pasadena
• Pasadena-Foothills Association of REALTORS
• Democrats of Pasadena Foothills
• Arroyo Democratic Club
• ACT Pasadena
• Armenian National Committee of America, Pasadena Chapter
• San Gabriel Valley Tribune
• Pasadena City Councilmember Victor Gordo
• Teamsters Local 911
• Outgoing Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education Member Mikala Rahn
• Outgoing Pasadena Unified School District Board of Education Member Tom Selinske

Campaign themes

2015

Ballotpedia survey responses

Cahalan participated in Ballotpedia's 2015 survey of school board candidates. The following sections display his responses to the survey questions.

Ranking the issues

The candidate was asked to rank the following issues by importance in the school district, with 1 being the most important and 7 being the least important. This table displays this candidate's rankings from most to least important:

Education policy
Click here to learn more about education policy in California.
Education on the ballot

Issue importance ranking
Candidate's ranking	Issue
1	Closing the achievement gap
2	Improving college readiness
3	Improving education for special needs students
4	Expanding arts education
5	Expanding career-technical education
6	Balancing or maintaining the district's budget
7	Expanding school choice options
Note: Cahalan included a note in response to this question, which reads: "I am not fond of the ranking of the issues in fourth question, since it presents the appearance that some of these goals can only be advanced at the expense of others. For example, "Expanding School Choice options" can be part and parcel of a strategy to improve college readiness, or vocational training. I believe many of these goals can be tackled simultaneously, without placing a priority of one over the other."

Positions on the issues

The candidate was asked to answer 11 questions from Ballotpedia regarding significant issues in education and the school district. The questions are in the left column, and the candidate's responses are in the right column of the following table:

Question	Response
What is your stance on implementing Common Core standards?	"The district has focused heavily on preparing teachers for Common Core, using professional development resources. We should continue along that path, implementing Common Core in a rollout where the teachers are given adequate training and materials to do it properly."
Should your district approve the creation of new charter schools?	"A charter would have to demonstrate the ability to meet a need not currently met by the district, and show that their outcomes are comparable or exceed District outcomes, corrected for major learning outcome factors"
Should the state give money to private schools through a voucher system?	"No"
Are standardized tests an accurate metric of student achievement?	"Standardized tests and GPA are the most accurate predictors of academic success... but they are terrible predictors. As a measure, they are useful. As a target, the are not."
How can the district ensure equal opportunities for high and low achieving students?	"We need to return our counseling department to full staffing levels. Right now, we're not getting the right resources to the right students; partially because the students and parents don't necessarily know to what they are entitled, and partially because we have had such deep cuts outside the classroom that our counseling services are simply inadequate to ensure that kids are getting the right help in maintaining their educational pathways."
How should expulsion be used in the district?	"Practices such as positive behavior strategies should be used before expulsion is considered."
If a school is failing in your district, what steps should the school board take to help the students in that school?	"This is a very complex issue. The first question is "what defines a failing school"? Is it declining enrollment, or test outcomes, or disciplinary problems, or some combination of the above? If the problem is one of testing outcomes, are we properly assessing success that is attributable to the school? Many of our EL students, for example, transfer into PUSD below grade level, and transfer back out due to family migrations. Meanwhile, they are replaced with another EL student, who comes into PUSD again below grade level, and transfers back out again due to family migrations. As a result, we have some schools that may be succeeding in reclassifying EL on a fairly consistent basis, but never have a reduced EL population. The best way to address problems at a school site is investing time in reaching out to the stakeholders at the school site to find out what the specific problem is and how the district can help address it."
Do you support merit pay for teachers?	"I'm not opposed to merit pay in theory, but it is difficult to implement without changing measures into targets. Given a sufficiently robust compound mesaurement of "merit", it can be a good idea."
How should the district handle underperforming teachers?	"Set up a mentorship program for the underperforming teacher with a more experienced teacher in the district."
How would you work to improve community-school board relations?	"I see three immediate venues: better board presence at the individual school sites, community outreach to the neighborhood associations in a Board member's Trustee Area, and collaboration with the City Council members who represent parts of your district. I have already been on the majority of the school sites in the District through my work with the District Advisory Council, I've met with leadership in Bungalow Heaven, Historic Highlands, Washington Square, and Downtown Pasadena Neighborhood associations, and I've had several meetings with Victor Gordo and Margaret McAustin, two of the three Councilmembers who overlap with Trustee Area 4."
If elected to the board, what would be your top priority?	"In each of the following three areas, I have a top priority: (1) Facilities and Operations There is misalignment between outcomes and resources at the moment. Partially this is due to a lack of a dedicated Facilities Manager in the last few years. We are avoiding capital equipment purchases and it is costing us in labor outcomes (for example, we have a paint truck that has been out of service for nearly a fifth of the working days last year, which prevents the painter from getting on site to do the jobs that need to get done). We need a bottom-to-top analysis in the facilities department to ensure we're not wasting money by trying to avoid spending it. (2) Community Outreach Outreach, as described in the previous answer (3) Communications The district web site, and the Measure TT web site, are both unacceptably out of date. This makes it difficult for the parent community to find accurate information about the district, often being referred to the *old* district web site for new information. This needs to be a priority for the IT department to fix."

Candidate website

Cahalan highlighted the following issues on his campaign website:

“	THE ROLE OF THE BOARD The education of the student should be the starting point for decision-making at the district level. The primary functions of the Board should be: Be a responsive voice of parents and citizens Set the strategic vision for the district Ensure the administration is implementing the strategy via oversight The Board is not the managerial body for the district, that is the job of the Superintendent. The Board, the Administration, the Teachers, and the Parents are the four groups that must work together if students are to succeed. Parents need to interact with Teachers to ensure their children are getting the education they need in the classroom and in the home. Teachers and Administrators need to work together to make sure that students develop and carry common capabilities in-between schools and programs. Administrators need to implement the vision of the Board. The Board needs to be answerable to the Parents and the entire Community. Communication with parent groups is a historical problem. Many concerned parent groups report that they are not given adequate notice of the upcoming Board agendas or are under-informed as to the role played by the Committees. It is critical that the parent and citizen community is truly and honestly engaged in the process. This requires better and more proactive communication on the part of the Board, as a whole. Parent and community concerns need to be identified and when agenda items arise that intersect with known concerns, particular care should be taken to ensure that parent and community stakeholders are informed. FUNDING AND BUDGETING The new statewide funding formula, called LCFF, channels more funds to school districts that have large populations of English Learners or Low Income students (EL/LI). This is happening at the same time that many categorical funding sources at the state level have been removed, in favor of local control. Essentially, each school district now receives a base grant and those that qualify (such as PUSD) get a lump concentration grant and a large measure of discretionary control over the funds. This is in comparison to the past, where the state had multiple funding streams of categorical funds that were directed at specific targets. To ensure that local districts have accountability over their funding, each school district is required to implement a Local Control Accountability Plan (the LCAP), which explains how the local district has chosen to address the needs of its student population (e.g., English Learners, Low Income students, Special Ed students, Foster youth). This represents a major change in the funding streams, and as a consequence a major change in spending classifications. To illustrate the difference: in the past, the state may have provided categorical funds directed at a particular purpose (e.g., special education transportation), and now those categorical funds are gone, but they are replaced by discretionary funds that the local school district can direct at special education transportation, with the local district's LCAP providing the justification for the decision to spend the discretionary funds on the specific need. This makes a direct comparison of PUSD's current budget with previous year's budgets extremely difficult. In this day and age of underfunded school districts, parents and community members are rightly concerned that the district is properly distributing funds to needy populations. Clear communication regarding spending decisions is essential to maintain trust in the leadership of the District. ABSENCES The funding of the district is not based only upon enrollment, but upon Average Daily Attendance, which was 17,394 in 2012-2013. The district lost approximately $3.5 million due to student absences in that year. Chronic absence and truancy are both significant problem statewide. At Longfellow, we see a very small number of students that are chronically absent, but the severity of the problem varies district-wide. This is a problem that individual school administrators cannot handle entirely on their own. District-level policies put into place to reduce chronic absenteeism need to be constantly revisited for effectiveness, but in addition coordination with the local government is necessary. ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLING The 2012 Census figure for 5-17 year old persons in the PUSD boundaries was 28,203. This means that about a third of the total student population opts out of PUSD's public school, choosing to attend either out of district public schools, charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling. While there is no objection to parents choosing alternative methods of schooling their children, this is a greater percentage than our neighboring districts of South Pasadena Unified, La Canada Unified, and Arcadia Unified. This implies a high likelihood that people are choosing alternative methods in our local district not only for personal reasons of choice or philosophy, but also because PUSD has a long-standing reputation as "not a good district". There are historical reasons for this, discussed below. The district must do a better job of marketing its successes to the public. DECLINING ENROLLMENT PUSD is also facing declining enrollment due to demographics. This is primarily due to a combination of a lack of affordable housing and generational changes in the average number of children in each American family. Urban planning studies show that cyclical factors also apply. People move into a city, establish themselves and start families, engage in the community, and eventually send their children off to college. Decades later, they may choose to leave their local area to move closer to their grandchildren, selling their homes to another couple starting to plan for their own children. In this stretch of time, neighborhoods that were formerly high concentrations of young families with children, with the need for local neighborhood schools, become neighborhoods with fewer school-age families. SCHOOL SITES Properly assessing local demand for public education, around the various school sites, and properly assigning district resources to those areas, is an ongoing balancing act between justifying overhead costs with the potential community impact of closing a school site. Some studies of Pasadena strongly suggest that the school district requires fewer overall schools at the present time. While this may be true from a cost-per-site perspective, school closure studies may not fully take into account the transportation costs of providing access to alternative sites for local residents, increased truancy or chronic tardiness caused by difficulties getting children to schools farther away, maintaining facilities that are no longer used as school locations but still need upkeep, and the possibility that closing a school site will encourage local parents to depart the district entirely for private or charter schools. Most importantly, the non-economic impacts on children and their families can cause difficulties in educational outcomes, ultimately defeating the root purpose of public education entirely. While hard choices may have to be made regarding local school sites, the district should exhaust all possible alternative avenues of keeping a site available as a school, before choosing to close the facility simply due to overhead costs. Offsetting costs or revenue enhancements can be achieved, for example, by opening up partnerships with the City or other organizations for use of the physical site for various purposes. This is done with success now at various school sites, for example Longfellow partners with Altadena Little League for access to their baseball fields, Muir High School partners with AYSO for use of the athletic fields for soccer, Eliot Middle School provides access to their gym for Brotherhood Community for youth basketball programs, Washington Middle's new gym will be built in cooperation with the City to provide after-hours access to the athletic facilities for the community, and so on. PARTNERSHIPS AND ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS It is a given that the demands on the modern public education system outstrip the state and federal funding necessary to meet all of those demands. For years public school districts have attempted to prioritize and balance basic educational competencies (reading, writing, and arithmetic) with social studies, civics, science, music, arts education, the humanities, physical education, and health education, just to name a few. One avenue that has been explored with success in PUSD is school site partnerships with outside resources that place limited demands on District overhead. For example, Washington STEAM Academy engaged in a professional development program with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Caltech, UCLA’s Center X and the L.A. County Office of Education. Longfellow Elementary has partnered with VYMA and now the Harmony Project to provide music instruction through the after-school LEARNS program. PUSD has partnered with ArtWorks to provide free after school art instruction. When resources through traditional routes are limited, creative partnerships can help bridge the gap to ensure that the students get access to quality educational opportunities. PUSD has been successful in establishing many of these partnerships, and we need to continue to seek out and develop them. DISTRICT REPUTATION AND RETENTION While this may have been true in 1985, it certainly is not true today. Since 2000, in particular, the District has made immense progress in educational outcomes. Pasadena High Schools now have a higher graduation rate than LAUSD, with Pasadena High School leading the way at a remarkably successful 92% graduation rate. The District has not done a good enough job of marketing its successes, leaving the public perception of the District to instead be reinforced by the rumor mill instead of positive data. There are signs for optimism. Departure to charter schools has declined in the last three years. Ten years ago, the District lost many families on the bridge between elementary and middle school, as many public school families chose to opt-out of the District when reaching the middle school level. That pattern seems to be changing, as involved parents of fifth graders are talking about the signature programs available in Pasadena middle schools. Indeed, many families are having trouble deciding which middle school to attend! If the District can retain students at the jump to middle school, erasing that historic problem, then we may see enrollment decline at a much slower rate. SIGNATURE PROGRAMS The dual-language immersion programs available at Jackson, San Rafael, and Field have boosted the enrollment at those schools in the last few years, to a high degree. It is evident that Pasadena parents want these programs. Indeed, the dual-language program combined with the STEM magnet at Jackson, and the IB program at Blair, have been successful in capturing public school children from outside PUSD! The district needs to ensure that there are clear and sustainable pathways for advancement on the signature program tracks, and they need to continue to add and expand these programs. DUAL LANGUAGE IMMERSION Glendale Unified School District has dual-language immersion programs in Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Armenian, German, Italian, and French. They offer both 90/10 and 50/50 language immersion programs. Dual language programs are bringing parents back to the public school system in LAUSD. Research shows these programs improve student outcomes. The success of the dual language programs in PUSD shows that the district has the capability to provide administrative and professional development support for dual language programs. STEM Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math are the backbone disciplines for the 21st century economy. Washington STEAM Academy and the App Academy at Pasadena High School are two excellent examples of the district expanding its offerings in STEM. The Magnet grant at Washington is not open-ended, however, and we need to plan for the future to ensure these programs are sustainable.	”
—Patrick Cahalan's campaign website (2015)

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Patrick Cahalan Pasadena United School District. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

Patrick Cahalan - Google News

See also

• Pasadena Unified School District, California
• Pasadena Unified School District elections (2015)

External links

Suggest a link

• Pasadena Unified School District
• Office website
• Campaign website
• Campaign Facebook page
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