The establishment of an independent study school at the Malibu High campus comes a year after two widely publicized school movements were announced, only to peter out.
In one campaign, a group of parents formed a large committee to campaign for the divorce of Malibu from the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. Volunteers in the Malibu Unified School Team started a sophisticated and organized community campaign to evaluate the financial viability for separating Malibu’s four then-existing schools from the Santa Monica-based district.
MUST organizer Tom Sorce said in an e-mail last summer that the district divorce study is on indefinite hold because the current level of state education funding is insufficient to support a Malibu-only district.
Observers noted the district currently balances its books with the help of little more than $6 million per year in voluntary contributions from the sales tax-rich City of Santa Monica, about 20 percent of which is spent in Malibu.
Although the city of Malibu donates a similar percentage of its budget to the district, that amount is smaller, reflecting Malibu’s much smaller retail sales base.
MUST sprang to life last year, when the district enacted a policy aimed at fairness that siphons about 9 percent of cash raised by Malibu parent and private groups to schools in less-affluent sections of Santa Monica. Parents there noted that the subsidization by the City of Santa Monica of students in Malibu is exponentially greater than the amount Malibu parents send the other direction.
A second campaign by a handful of parents to break Malibu High out of district control by converting it into a charter school campus has apparently sputtered to a stop, after attracting scant parent support.