The board members and superintendent say a healing process needs to take place in the divided Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.
By Jonathan Friedman / Assistant Editor
With the hope of beginning a healing process in a divided school district, several Board of Education members said at last Thursday’s meeting they are committed to using Measure BB bond money for proposed middle school projects, including a two-story wing at Malibu High School. However, except for Malibu member Kathy Wisnicki, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District board members stopped short of endorsing an accelerated process to direct money toward those projects.
The comments come after Malibu parents have expressed outrage at the board’s decision to reduce Malibu’s share of Measure BB facilities improvement money from $27.5 million to $13.5 million.
At last week’s meeting, several board members, with the most vocal being Vice President Jose Escarcé and board member Barry Snell, said they wanted to see the enrollment projection statistics that a district consultant is currently calculating prior to voting on further facility improvement funding. The enrollment projections are expected to be ready for the board at its Feb. 21 meeting. At this meeting, the board will also have a discussion item on its agenda regarding the funding of middle school projects with money generated from Measure BB, the $268 million facilities improvement bond approved by voters in 2006. And at its March 13 meeting, the board is expected to vote on the item.
“I believe having the secondary schools as a priority is a right thing,” Escarcé said at the meeting. “I am 100 percent committed to those projects.”
Snell added, “I hope this is the beginning of a process of healing. We look at this district as one.”
Malibu education activist Laura Rosenthal, who sits on the Measure BB Advisory Committee, said after the meeting she is “cautiously optimistic” about the statements by the board members.
“I think saying something and voting on it, making it happen, are two different things,” Rosenthal said. “It’s been almost three months since the original vote [when the Board of Education rejected funding of middle school projects], and I don’t see why anything hasn’t been done since then if they [board members] truly thought a wrong had occurred.”
The committee that Rosenthal sits on will vote on a recommendation for the board at its Feb. 19 meeting. The committee on Jan. 7 voted 7-6, with one abstention, against recommending the board use $42 million of undesignated Measure BB money to fund middle school projects. But school district attorneys have determined that vote should be voided because of procedural errors that occurred during the meeting.
District Superintendent Dianne Talarico said at last week’s board meeting that she would prefer the BB Committee not take up the matter again because a consensus vote from the committee is impossible. She noted that nearly all its major votes are divided, like the one on Jan. 7, along city lines. She highlighted a December meeting when barely a majority of the committee members supported even having the vote on Jan. 7.
“Perhaps [district] staff should come back with a revised recommendation [for the board], and not throw it back to the BB Committee to reach consensus, when it’s been clear they have been unable to do that,” Talarico said. She added, “There is a lot of divisiveness right now. There is a lot of healing that is going to have to occur. Another month or two of stalemate is not going to be in anybody’s interest. And if it hasn’t happened already, this is going to impact our students. I don’t want the kids in the middle of this nonsense.”
The majority of the district board members did not side with this proposal. Snell said he “would like to at least give the BB Committee the opportunity” to make a recommendation.
“I know it’s been difficult,” he said. “The process has to be a transparent public process… I’m still confident the BB Committee has the ability to do it [make a recommendation.]”
The dispute over Measure BB funding stretches back to October when the Board of Education, at the recommendation of the Measure BB Advisory Committee, eliminated middle school projects (including those at the two Santa Monica schools and at Malibu High) from the initial list of staff-recommended projects to be funded by Measure BB money. Thirty-eight million dollars was set aside to be designated later. At several board meetings, Malibu residents asked the district officials to immediately support using that undesignated money to fund the $14 million Malibu High middle school project, but a majority of the board refused each time.
Then on Jan. 7, the BB Committee made its vote against recommending the board allocate the undesignated money (which it has since been determined would be $62 million rather than $38 million if the district sells the bonds in six years rather than eight).