Unification Committee on Slow Roll to Independent Malibu District

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Malibu High School

District separation talks were bogged down in financial details for over an hour Thursday night before talk turned to action.

“At some point, we have to move from gathering information to doing something,” Santa Monica-Malibu Unification Committee Facilitator Karen Orlansky said toward the end of a two-hour meeting on July 14.

Orlansky is not officially on the committee, and doesn’t represent Santa Monica or Malibu, but likely said what the citizens from both districts are thinking.

So-called “unification” is the state’s name for school district separation. The Unification Committee, made up of three Malibu and three Santa Monica representatives, plus Orlansky, has been tasked with meeting weekly in order to iron out how a potential separation of districts between Santa Monica and Malibu could be mutually beneficial. The State of California has laid out criteria that must be met in order to form a new school district.

Currently, the committee is guided by a 60-day deadline, which ends on September 3, 2016. In the past this deadline has been extended.

The unification committee is still in early discussions and hasn’t begun to create a rough plan, even after months of meetings. Thursday’s meeting was dense with material.

Much of the Thursday meeting was dedicated to reviewing model predictions provided by district-contracted firm School Services of California (SSC). The group was brought on by the school board to forecast what the financials for separated Malibu and Santa Monica districts would look like in future years.

SSC representatives Robert Miyashiro and Mike Ricketts exhaustively went over each of their several dozen-page long reports, which looked at the long-term and short-term outlooks for each prospective independent district. 

Although much of the discussion was technical, the committee saw it as an essential step toward the eventual unification goal.

“By getting the first, initial report from School Services of California, we are now fully engaged with our main assignment: to find a mutually agreeable solution for separation,” Committee Member Laura Rosenthal said in an email to The Malibu Times. Rosenthal represents Malibu on the committee and also sits on the Malibu City Council.

Potential outcomes provided by SSC showed multiple ways a solution for separation could be found.

“Let’s say we separate. Can we go back and say, ‘Where would we have been if we didn’t separate?’ At what point do you know it’s final?” Committee Member Tom Larmore of Santa Monica said. “That’s more important any particular scenario.”

Other committee members agreed with Larmore’s suggestion, which came after nearly two hours of dissecting the specifics of SSC’s report.

Other committee members noted that some elements of the district restructuring had changed as the committee had been meeting, making it difficult to put a fine point on when to initiate a separation. 

“Maybe it’s about structuring a strategy with some benchmarks. It changes so rapidly — it may even change a year from now. It’s so hard to forecast even for those who do this for a living,” Committee Member Debbie Mulvaney of Santa Monica said. 

On this point, the committee briefly discussed “reopeners” — issues that would warrant a change in plan. Some of these concerns were redirected back to the potential of forecasting them through the model made by SSC. 

“I think this is a really informative conversation,” Ricketts said following Larmore’s suggestion of comparing split districts versus a combined one. “I think it’s very doable, and I think it’s actually easier to combine it than it is to try to split them apart. Once it’s split, it’s easy to combine it and say what would it have looked like had there never been a reorganization.” 

Internally, the committee doesn’t have a self-imposed deadline for when negotiations will conclude. The Unification Committee meetings are open to the public and meet alternatively in Santa Monica and Malibu every Tuesday.