A Malibu parent expresses shame she feels over some in the Malibu community not wanting to participate in the gift fund proposal.
By Jonathan Friedman/Staff Writer
Supporters and opponents of Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy’s original gift policy proposal spoke out against his revised version at last Thursday’s Board of Education meeting. Supporters of the first proposal called the new one a watered-down version that failed to address inequality in the district, while opponents of the original plan said the new one was still unacceptable, calling it a tax.
The original proposal called for 15 percent of all cash gifts to be put into an equity fund, with the total money in the fund being distributed to all the district schools on a weighted scale. The new plan would place the 15 percent requirement only on the first $100,000 donated. For the next $100,000, just 13 percent would have to be placed into the fund. The percentage would decrease for every $100,000 after that, with no percentage of any amount more than $800,000 having to go into the fund. In addition, a separate voluntary equity fund would be set up for anybody who wants to contribute to it. Lastly, a requirement for a 15 percent cash equivalent of non-monetary gifts be placed into the fund was eliminated in the updated proposal.
Although the meeting took place in Santa Monica, it included a larger contingent of Malibu parents in support of the proposal than any previous hearing on the item had.
“I am ashamed of my community,” said Carol Coote, commenting on the many Malibu parents who have been speaking out against the proposal since it was first made in November. “I am ashamed of the outcry this has created.”
Coote called the new proposal an “embarrassing compromise”
to an already modest proposal. She added that the Education Foundation, the organization that raises money for the district, gets most of its donations for its “For the Arts” program from Santa Monica parents, but the money is still evenly distributed throughout the district. Coote said it was interesting Malibu parents were fine with that, while they complained about Deasy’s proposal.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Malibu parent Kristina Peterson presented Deasy and the board with research information she had gathered on other school districts she said Deasy had pointed to as having a similar system to his proposal, which, she said, actually did not. Peterson said Deasy had told parents at PTA meetings that school districts in cities such as Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle and four other districts had similar plans. After researching the issue, she discovered they did not.
“We parents deserve a higher ethical standard of behavior from the district’s chief executive responsible for our children’s education,” she said.
Deasy responded that his intention had never been to imply the other districts had an equity fund that was used to distribute money to other schools, but rather that they also had student-weighted formulas for how donation money is used. In his original proposal that appears on the district’s Web site, Deasy wrote, “This new policy extends an already deeply held set of beliefs to the arena of possibility for all through a mechanism dealing with funding issues. This practice is not new, in fact, it is used in districts like: Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle, and Verona.”
Peterson’s husband, Ken, presented the board with a letter from the regional president of Wells Fargo in opposition to the proposal. Wells Fargo donated money to several district schools this past year, although all of them were in Malibu or the higher-income areas of Santa Monica.
In addition to the supporters of the original agreement from Malibu, a number of Santa Monica parents also spoke about a need to return to the first proposal. Meanwhile, the board members did not speak on the issue. Instead they decided to wait until this Thursday’s meeting, at which time the board will make a recommendation to Deasy. They stressed it will not be a final vote.