at annual address
Malibu residents on Monday questioned school district officials regarding Malibu representation on the school board and why the district will not be paying the full cost of field lighting at Malibu High School.
By Knowles Adkisson and Angelique LaCour / The Malibu Times
School district officials got an earful Monday night at the annual State of Our Schools address from locals regarding Malibu representation on the school board and the cost of field lights at Malibu High School.
The address, which took place at Malibu City Hall, featured presentations from each of the public schools in Malibu, as well as Superintendent Sandra Lyon.
But in a Q&A following the talks, residents asked School Board President Ben Allen and district Chief Financial Officer Jan Maez why the school district would not pay for the entire cost of permanent field lighting at Malibu High School. The Coastal Commission last October approved the lights on a limited basis after previously rejecting them. At its last meeting, the school board approved $225,760 to pay for so-called “soft costs” for the project, including design work and CEQA environmental studies. The project is projected to cost $665,000 in total. A private group in Malibu is reportedly raising money to make up the difference.
Allen and Maez noted that the Environmental Impact Report for the much broader campus improvement project for the high school and middle school was only finalized last week. They said that project had been delayed previously due to the original controversy over field lights, and said the decision was made not to include the lights in the project. If that had not been done, they estimated the campus improvement project would have been delayed another two years.
Some residents also questioned why Malibu could not be given a permanent non-voting seat on the Board of Education. Each of the seven members of the board currently lives in Santa Monica, and Malibu has been without a representative since Kathy Wisnicki left the board in 2008.
The school district officials responded that the school board had met previously with members of Advocates for Malibu Public Schools (AMPS), a citizen group that seeks an independent Malibu school district, to discuss the proposal. After that meeting, the proposal was placed on the agenda for the school board’s Feb. 2 meeting.
However, the board also has a tentative meeting scheduled for March 1 with the Los Angeles County Office of Education about the feasibility of Malibu and Santa Monica breaking off into separate districts. Allen said AMPS members requested that any discussion item by the board on adding a non-voting Malibu member wait until after the board’s meeting with the county.
Superintendent Sandra Lyon, who succeeded Tim Cuneo last summer, also spoke about ballot measures scheduled to go before California voters this fall that will result in either raised taxes or major automatic cuts to schools. Lyon said the ballot measures will not be finalized until May, which will hamper the district’s budgetary planning for next year. She quoted Mark Twain: “Prediction is difficult, especially when it involves the future.”