Schools

'All Our Best People Are Leaving For South Pas,' Temple City School Board Member Says

Brain drain into South Pas drives Temple City administrator "crazy."

During his eight years on the Temple City Unified School District Board, Joe Walker has been privileged to work with some of the finest educators—many of whom are no longer in Temple City but in South Pasadena.

In the first board meeting of the South Pasadena Unified School District's new school year, held Sept. 3, a few teachers newly hired from Temple City introduced themselves. After about half an hour of similar introductions by SPUSD's recent hires, Walker used the public comments period to give a hilarious but not entirely stress-free three-minute presentation about how a string of Temple City’s best teachers have ended up in South Pas over the years.

“This room is really amazing,” Walker started out by saying, referring to the venue of the SPUSD board meeting at the district’s offices on El Centro Street. “When the founding fathers laid out Washington D.C., they wanted to have the home court advantage, and this room really has a home court advantage.”

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He added, looking deadpan: “Over at Temple City Unified School District, our board office is a former waiting room in a Kaiser Permanente building.”

But then Walker, who works as a crime analyst for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, went for the proverbial kill. Referring to Karen Reed, SPUSD assistant superintendent of human resources, he said he was “thrilled to vote” for her hiring in Temple City several years ago—and then he got a call from “this guy.”

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The seemingly casual but dramatic “this guy” reference was to none other than SPUSD Superintendent Joel Shapiro.

“Tell me about Karen Reed,” Shapiro evidently pressed Walker over the phone, according to the former Temple City School District president’s speech. “And the whole room starts spinning—I don’t want Karen to leave, I don’t want Karen to leave. But I had to tell the truth.”

Added Walker: “Next thing I know, Karen’s gone to South Pas. Okay, our loss, your gain.”

A year later, one of Temple City’s best principals, Cheryl Busick, went over to head the Arroyo Vista Elementary School, Walker said, adding that she was “my daughter’s teacher—[I] loved her to death.”

That’s when he started seeing a pattern, Walker said—“all our best people are leaving for South Pas.” Walker added that he begged Reed to “please stop taking all our best administrators, stop taking our best people.”

The result? “Bing, bing, bing—four or five teachers from Temple City come to South Pas,” Walker said. “I mean, it’s like you go to Arroyo Vista or Marengo and it’s like, Hey, I know you from Temple City! It’s really making me crazy.”

Allegedly not satisfied with “stealing our teachers,” Reed has even been “stealing our former student board reps,” Walker said, referring to this year’s hiring by the SPUSD of High School math teacher Anthony Chan.

“I do have a solution to this brain drain from Temple City,” Walker went on to say, adding, tongue-in-cheek: “When’s your contract up, Mr. Shapiro?”

As the room exploded into laughter, SPUSD Board President David Adelstein quipped: “Your time has expired—thank you very much.”

As if Walker’s comments required some “damage control,” Shapiro pitched in. “Although it was just mentioned, Ms. Reed, how instrumental you are in brining these new folks to us, I just want to take a minute and point that out,” the school superintendent said. “Obviously, you didn’t do it alone. We had principals who hired. But the organization from your office and you in particular made it possible for these wonderful new teachers to join our district.”

Shapiro denied South Pas recruits teachers from other school districts. “Anytime someone comes to the South Pasadena School District, they apply,” he told Patch. “We do not recruit—we don’t think it’s a good practice. 

The superintendent said Walker’s comments were the first of their kind that the school board had ever heard, and if there are any misgivings about teachers being solicited to South Pasadena, “it would be good to straighten them out.”

For his part, Walker said he was not objecting to the fact that South Pasadena tends to attract Temple City's best teachers. Rather, his comments were meant to “praise Ms. Karen Reed for drawing such great people,” he said, adding that while she "always seems to hire away our best administrators and teachers, the very few that I would be thrilled to leave never seem to make that drive to South Pas."

His comments were also directed toward school administrators who generally "tend to take themselves very seriously, which is why you might have sensed some uncomfortable looks on their faces," said Walker, who was the only speaker during the Sept. 3 board meeting's public comments period. 

"I am sure a school board member from another district has never spoken to their board unless he/she was part of some group trying to sell them something,” he said.  

Click here to view a video of the SPUSD board meeting—Walker's comments come on about 40 minutes into the recording.


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