Tonight, all over town, the backpacks are packed. The lunches are half-made. Somewhere a freshman is checking a class schedule for the fourth time.
Tomorrow morning, Wednesday, August 12, some 4,800 students head back to Arroyo Vista, Marengo, and Monterey Hills Elementary Schools, South Pasadena Middle School, and South Pasadena High School, and every one of them walks onto campus with something to be proud of. Because the school year this town just finished was not a good year. It was a great one. The kind you tell people about.
First, the practical business for tonight. Final schedules and teacher assignments for all grade levels are available now, as of 5 p.m. this evening, through the Aeries Parent/Student Portal at southpasadenausd.aeries.net. Families who have not yet completed data confirmation should log in and take care of it as soon as possible. High school students already got a head start last week: juniors and seniors returned to SPHS on Thursday, August 6 for the first of two registration days, with freshmen and sophomores following on Friday, August 7, picking up course requests and textbooks, taking student ID photos, making ASB purchases, and, for the incoming freshmen, swapping in their Chromebooks for new ones.
And parents, before we go one line further, know this: there is no article long enough to hold everything these students, teachers, and schools accomplished last year. Not this one, not one twice its size. What follows are highlights, and they matter, but for every award named here there are a hundred quieter wins that never made a press release. A kid who finally cracked long division. A first chair earned. A team that lost every game and showed up anyway. Count those too. They are the real record.
Now, the headlines.
Ten New Teachers Join The Roster
The newest Tigers arrived before the students did. On Monday, August 10, SPUSD welcomed 10 new certificated staff members at a New Teacher Orientation held in the District Office boardroom. School Board members, Superintendent Angela Elizondo Baxter, and the District leadership team were on hand to greet them, with the orientation and training led by Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Judy Correnti and Administrator of Programs and Personnel Services Katy Nielsen.
Ten educators who chose South Pasadena. Tomorrow morning they meet their students for the first time, and by winter break most of them will wonder how they ever taught anywhere else. Welcome to the district.
A Banner Year, Literally
South Pasadena Middle School enters the new year as an officially designated 2026 California Distinguished School. That is one of the highest honors the state gives a public campus, awarded for strong academics and real, measured growth across student groups, and it belongs to Principal Cheryl Busick, Assistant Principal Michael Mora, and every teacher, kid, and family who walks through those doors. When your middle schooler shrugs and says school was fine, remember: the State of California disagrees. It says their school is one of the best.
Then this town did something remarkable. In June, voters passed Measure SP, a $128 million bond for school facilities, with more than 73 percent saying yes. It needed 55. South Pasadena did not squeak it past. South Pasadena ran it up the flagpole. The money stays local, an independent citizens oversight committee watches every dollar with annual audits, and it goes to work on roofs, plumbing, electrical systems, modern labs, campus security, and a seismic renovation of the historic Anderson Auditorium. The students walking through the gates tomorrow will learn in buildings this community chose to invest in. That is worth saying out loud at dinner tonight.
And the district honored the people who make it all go. Arroyo Vista fourth grade teacher Jennifer Simon is the 2026 SPUSD Teacher of the Year, and she will represent South Pasadena in the Los Angeles County program. She is joined by site honorees at every school: Cecily Phalen-Bartolome at Marengo, Janet Lim at Monterey Hills, Ani Atoyan at the middle school, and Dave Baughman at the high school. If your child had any of them, you already know.
The Tigers Gave Us A Season To Remember
Start with Friday nights. SPHS football won its second consecutive outright Rio Hondo League championship, sealing it with a 48-6 win over Temple City, and charged all the way to the CIF Southern Section semifinals, the program’s fourth trip that deep in five years, before falling in overtime one game short of the final. Heartbreaking? Sure. But step back and look at what this program has become. Four semifinals in five years does not happen by accident. It happens because of coaches, players, and a stadium full of this town every single week.
Girls volleyball brought home a league championship of its own, going 9-1 in league and 23-10 overall, winning the title in five sets on the road at La Canada and advancing in the CIF Southern Section Division 3 playoffs.
And then there is Rod Khollesi. The 6-foot-5 senior scored 52 points in a single game against Temple City, breaking the SPHS record, and finished the season with 768 points, more than 27 a game with 8 rebounds, 9 double-doubles, and 201 made free throws, the third most in California and sixth in the entire nation. He carried a 3.8 GPA while he did it, and coach Ernest Baskerville, thirty years on the bench, called him possibly the best student-athlete he has ever coached. That is a South Pasadena kid. Nation-leading numbers, honor-roll grades, zero ego.
The excellence went well past the fields and courts. Aiden Lee on viola, Justin Kim on clarinet, and Wilson Jaroch on horn earned spots in the 2026 California All-State music ensembles, three of the finest young musicians in the state, all wearing Tiger colors. Two SPHS students won national Gold and Silver Medals in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Seniors in the Project Lead the Way Honors Engineering capstone stood in front of panels of professional engineers and presented inventions they designed themselves. And on June 3, the Class of 2026 threw their caps into the sky over Ray Solari Stadium and headed off to write the next chapter.
This School Year Arrives Loaded
‘Measure SP‘ gets to work. The planning and first phases of the facilities program begin, with the oversight committee forming and updates coming all year. Students get to watch their schools get better in real time.
A brand new athletic frontier. The longtime Rio Hondo League gives way this fall to something bigger: the Rio Hondo and Pacific league schools, plus two Mission Valley additions, combine into a 16-team conference split into three divisions based on competitive equity. New opponents, fresh rivalries, and the Tigers walk in as back-to-back football champions. Get to the games. All of them.
And the foundation under it all holds strong. Seventeen AP courses and seventeen CIF sports at the high school. More than 25 arts courses across the district. Forty-five hours of community service completed by every SPHS graduate. A district that has been doing this since 1886, 140 years and counting.
It Takes This Whole Town, And This Town Shows Up
A reminder of what surrounds these schools.
The South Pasadena Educational Foundation is about to do something it has never done in nearly five decades. This year, for the first time, SPEF expects to deliver more than $1 million to SPUSD schools in a single year. Those orange lawn signs around town turn into roughly 100 teacher grants annually, plus funding for biomedical science, engineering, and broadcast journalism pathways, performing arts, science field trips, the Fifth Grade Musical, SPEF Summer School, and Parti Gras every May. One million dollars, raised neighbor by neighbor. Take a bow, South Pasadena.
The PTAs at all five schools, the SPHS Boosters, and a small army of parent volunteers carry the daily load, from classroom help to the Friday night snack bar. If you have ever wondered whether pitching in matters, the answer is all around you.
And keep an eye out Tuesday mornings at 7:55, because the Bike Bus is rolling. Organized by South Pas Active, an all-volunteer group working to make every block of the city safe to walk and bike, the Bike Bus is a chaperoned group ride to Arroyo Vista and Marengo along five set routes, with crossing guards holding the intersections and families welcome to join anywhere along the way. On Fridays the Walk Bus does it on foot, coordinated with the school PTAs. It is part of a global bike bus movement, but watch it pass once, a ringing, laughing convoy of kids pedaling to school together, and you will know it could only be this town. Helmets required. Routes and sign-ups at southpasactive.org.
Add the Public Library’s youth programs, the city’s parks and recreation lineup, and the weekend leagues at Orange Grove and Arroyo Park, and you see the whole picture. These kids are surrounded, in the best possible way.
See You In The Morning!
So this is it. New backpacks, new teachers – ten of them, new season, new conference, new buildings on the way, and a foundation crossing the multi-million-dollar line. Let’s Gooooo!
Welcome back, Tigers !!!
