San Rafael Saga: A Parent-Journalist POV
My 6-year-old daughter Roxie outside of San Rafael Elementary School less than a year before a summer camp killed her in 2019.
AUGUST 25, 2022
On August 25, I MADE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT TO the Board of Education for the Pasadena Unified School District:
After claiming victory in the 2020 Pasadena mayoral race, Victor Gordo said:
“While we may have made important strides in racial equality, we have a way to go. Anytime people don’t feel treated fairly, we ALL have a responsibility to correct that. There are people who feel they aren’t treated fairly as it relates to the law, education, and opportunity, and Pasadena has a responsibility to find common ground and be part of the solution.”
A week ago, however, Gordo apparently determined that finding common ground and being part of the solution required him to make a public statement in which he said, San Rafael Elementary School Principal Rudy Ramirez’s comments were inflammatory and not factual. Gordo said Ramirez should be held accountable because his professionalism and judgment should not ever deviate.
Ramirez’s comments certainly have driven a wedge between even the best of friends and closest of colleagues. But what about the greater system that plunged us into this moment?
As a journalist, it is understandable that the Pasadena Board of Education leverages Government Code Section 54957 — the right to hold closed door sessions — to debate relevant matters behind closed doors. In doing so, however, that very secrecy has the capacity to exacerbate public suspicion. Citizens are not allowed to hear arbiters navigate facts and opinions that will greatly impact policies, if not lives.
Full disclosure: as a former San Rafael parent and one who knows Ramirez, the school’s teachers, its parents and PUSD personnel, I do not condone what he said. However, I also do not condone what Gordo said or what he did to tip the scale of judgment toward a narrative that befit him.
Therefore, is it Ramirez’s comments that have driven a wedge between our citizens or is it a fraught system that actually landed us in this familiar moment?
Gordo and Ramirez have a lot more in common than Gordo implied to his 140,000 constituents, let alone the greater Los Angeles population that is now privy to this tragic saga. It is those two men who should have sat behind closed doors to compress and convert their concerns into solutions that would deescalate this crisis.
The City of Roses must acknowledge its thorns. Policing is hard. So too is cleaning a 20,000 square foot educational facility by yourself on a sweltering hot Sunday for laughable wages.
It takes a village to break a system. Every detail in the neighbor’s call to police dispatch was wrong. Why? The system that put an innocent custodian in cuffs for almost seven minutes is a broken system. The system that covertly recorded Ramirez and subsequently distributed that recording is a broken system.
The PUSD Board of Education is arguably now the most critical link in the chain of this system. We will see if this board considers the vast amount of context before – in Gordo’s own words – it finds common ground.