For all the woes that have beleaguered the Pasadena Unified School District throughout its long history, an athletic collapse was one that was hardly predictable even just 10 years ago.

Its football and basketball programs were frequent contenders for state championships, and Jackie Robinson’s legacy as a John Muir High School alum is the stuff of legend. And yet, based on recent performance, the suspension of Blair High School’s football program two weeks ago might as well have been inevitable.

The varsity team was three games into the season, in which it had scored just as many points, and had only had 20 players on its roster. The skeleton crew was no surprise for a team that hadn’t won a game since 2014, or won a game in the Rio Hondo League since 2009. Officials said the decision was made for the safety of the students, since they would be playing against teams comprised almost exclusively of juniors and seniors.

The announcement was another setback for a district already suffering from a serious image problem, and though it may seem the program’s suspension was a result of its own distinct process of atrophy, the reality is much more complex. Throughout the district, wealthier families have eschewed public schools for the dozens of private school options, leaving programs like Blair’s devoid of the star talent they once had.

The End of Segregation and the Rise of Private Schools

If you squint just the right way, there’s a swirling, curlicued line pointing back to a 1970 federal court order to desegregate the schools.

Long-time locals are well aware of the fact the district was the first outside the South to face such an order, and the forced busing that followed led to a slew of private schools popping up in the area, which in turn paved the tarmac for the white flight that seemed imminent as soon as the judge’s gavel hit the sound block.

But what many don’t realize is that while the district’s schools suffered academically at the time, a lot of things have changed in the ensuing 46 years. Student performance is one of them.

The district’s test scores fell in the years following the order, according to reports at the time, likely because students from wealthier families who tend to perform better academically fled public schools. But recent scores from both the STAR tests, which ended in 2013, and the more recent CAASSP tests show an overall improvement in every subject at the district’s high schools year-to-year.

The district’s graduation rate, which has averaged out to about 79.3 percent over the past five years, is higher than the county average (75.5 percent) and right in line with the state average (79 percent).

Skeptical Parents Becomes Believers

Steve Cole, who has 6th- and 9th-grade daughters attending Blair, can testify to the disconnect that seems to exist between public perception and how the schools are actually performing.

“In 1998, our real estate agent told us, ‘You need to go private, or leave the city, go to San Marino or Arcadia, because the Pasadena school system isn’t good,” Cole said. “It turned out to be completely false. Our experience has been nothing but positive.”

Cole and his wife made the decision to send their older daughter to the district’s Longfellow Elementary School, “with a little trepidation,” because they couldn’t afford private school on their middle-class incomes. They figured that if the experience was really as bad as everyone made it out to be, they’d reassess their options after a year.

Nine years later, he’s the president of Blair’s PTSA and the total embodiment of a satisfied customer.

“The instruction overall is very high quality and very good, and with that instruction comes access to administration and access to teachers,” Cole said. “I’ve never gone to our principal and not had any worries or fears I have addressed in a constructive way, and it’s been the same way with teachers.”

Indeed, a survey the district commissioned earlier this year found that 88 percent of the district’s parents are satisfied with their schools, which Paul Goodwin, who conducted the survey for the district, likened to “Disneyland-like numbers” at a presentation of the findings in June.

“When you ask people how they feel about a public institution, you very rarely see numbers like this,” he said.

So why the bad reputation?

Public School Demographics Drastically Different than General Population

The complicated reality is the district’s academic improvement has happened even as racial minorities and lower-income students have become increasingly overrepresented. Cole acknowledged the schools might not represent the broader Pasadena community. He said of Longfellow that he doesn’t “even think white registers as a cohort” — and while that’s an exaggeration, he’s not too far off. The school was 8 percent white in the 2015-16 school year, and that share has wavered between 4 and 9 percent over the past 10 years. While that is much lower than the district average of 17 percent, the city as a whole was 62.1 percent white in 2014, according to Census data.

It’s also worth noting the district is increasingly made up of students from poorer families. The trend is notable at all of the district’s schools, and is perhaps the most striking at Jackie Robinson’s own John Muir High School. While 46 percent of students at the school were eligible for free or reduced price meals in the 2000-01 school year, that share had grown to 76 percent in the 2015-16 school year.

This alone can’t explain why a lackluster reputation endures — personal experience plays a significant role, too.

Jacky Samartin went to Pasadena High School in the ’80s, and her years there were a major factor in her decision to send her own children to private school. She’s now the president of the Parent Association at La Salle High School, where her son, who’s a sophomore at the University of Arizona, graduated and where her daughter is now a sophomore.

Samartin was one of a few of her peers who went to college, and she credits that to her parents, because they were clear that she “didn’t have a choice.” But that expectation wasn’t common among other students at the school. She now holds her own children to that same standard, which was a “driving force” in deciding where to send them for school.

“In Pasadena, the public high schools are substandard,” she said. “They were 30 years ago when I was in high school, and they still are.”

While the decision was tough financially, she doesn’t regret a penny of it.

“It’s not easy to spend that money every year, but it is totally 100 percent worth it,” she said. “We have one in college now, and to see how well he was prepared — he walked into college having no problems, he was very well adjusted and is doing very well.”

John Blackstock, a spokesman for La Salle, said that he couldn’t comment on Pasadena’s public schools, but he did say the number one reason parents end up choosing the private school is because 99.5 percent of its students go on to college.

“With 100 percent college prep and quite a number of AP and honors classes — I think parents look for that,” he said. He added that La Salle has a good relationship with Pasadena Unified in terms of athletics, some crossover in science classes, and a public service project where La Salle students tutor children in Pasadena’s public elementary schools.

Survey Provides Hope for Pasadena Unified

The district itself is aware of its image problem and is in the midst of taking serious action to address it. The survey it conducted this year was distributed to parents within the district, but also to former parents who had left for other schooling options, as well as to parents in the area who never sent their kids to public school. The district commissioned the survey to help guide its path to becoming more competitive and attractive to parents.

The survey found that, of the parents who left the district, 73 percent were concerned about academic quality, and 64 percent were concerned about safety and student behavior. It also found that 32 percent of parents who have left the district would consider coming back if these concerns were adequately addressed. Goodwin said there’s hope to be found in that 32 percent, and added that Pasadena Unified is a Goldilocks fit for dealing with those issues.

“You’re not so big, you’re not LA Unified big that (the district) can’t turn, it can’t make changes, it can’t respond,” he said. “This district is smaller and can do this stuff. At the same time, it’s large enough to have assets that come with a variety of options.”

How the District Plans to Change Its Image

The district does indeed have plenty of options, and it’s trying to translate those to Pasadena parents. While Pasadena Unified has been far from immune from the declining enrollment, and declining funding, that has plagued the region in recent years, it has been trying to use its resources efficiently.

To an extent, this explains the demise of the Pasadena sports powerhouse. Parents have made clear that academics are their biggest concern, and the district has responded by heavily focusing on those options. But its recent hire of Gilbert Barraza in the new position of district-wide athletic director is an attempt to revamp the neglected sports programs and bring them back to their former glory.

“The district has been building up our academic programs so that we have robust educational opportunities in PUSD,” spokeswoman Hilda Ramirez-Horvath said. But she also added that “we have had this history with being a powerhouse of sports, and so knowing this … (Barraza) is working closely with coaching staffs to develop a quality sports program and identify areas that need to be addressed, like coaching stipends and other areas where we need to be competitive.”

The long and short of it is that the district is trying, in the best way it knows how, to shed a reputation that has been compounded more by generational wisdom than by modern experience.

Associate Superintendent Mercy Santoro’s solution to change the conversation about Pasadena public schools is almost simple.

“We’re listening,” she said. “We’re open and receptive to areas that maybe other people would feel too vulnerable to (be) dealing with.”

For what it’s worth, Goodwin is convinced the data shows an optimistic outlook.

“You’re laying the groundwork to compete effectively with the other schools in this area, and you know, I think that you’re going to witness competition — gradually, steadily, but I think you’re going to be able to compete effectively with them,” he said. “And to me, that means the future is pretty bright for this district.”