On Thursday, Sept. 1, the committee tasked with separating the Santa Monica-Malibu School District reached a decision about how revenue streams would be divided once the unified district is dissolved.
There are various methods that can be used to decide how revenue will be split once Santa Monica and Malibu break apart, but committee members came to a consensus that an attendance count would be the most fair and simple method.
Unification Committee Member Tom Larmore began the discussion by admitting he had “convinced himself” that splitting the largest revenue source by average daily attendance (ADA) was the best option. Essentially, each district claims funding depending on how many students it has.
The Unification Committee is a joint effort of Malibu and Santa Monica to find common ground on how the current district can separate into individual districts without detracting from one another. The committee is made up of three representatives from Malibu and three representatives from Santa Monica. They meet once a week, with each meeting alternating between cities.
In previous meetings, Santa Monica members were concerned that a Santa Monica school district would be disadvantaged by a so-called “ADA” method of splitting revenue. Their alternative would require a more intricate approach to balance the disproportions in funding.
Larmore concluded the difference would have been close to an 85/15 split (85 percent of revenue for Santa Monica and 15 percent for Malibu) for ADA versus 84/16 for the more complicated approach.
“Even when the general fund balance is $32 million, that’s $320,000. It certainly looks like that number is going down, not up,” Larmore said. “In a couple years — that’s a minor difference.”
Average Daily Attendance was the method of revenue splitting that the consulting firm WestEd suggested for the district separation.
Typically, ADA is calculated once per year — in October. The committee chose to take the three-year average of ADA for each district.
The breakthrough on the ADA decision became the bedrock for the remaining revenue discussions. Almost all the remaining revenue streams were split by attendance, with the exception of “revenues” that had negative balances or topics that were deferred for more information.
The committee plans to revisit these topics and how to split physical assets during its next meeting in Santa Monica on Sept. 6.
The Santa Monica-Malibu School Board extended the Unification Committee’s deadline to Nov. 2. This rolling 60 day deadline has been extended twice in the past.
Simplifying the proceedings
There might be more interest in Malibu’s separation from the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District if the topic wasn’t so dense with technical information.
“It’s a lot of numbers and information and unless you came to all the meetings and read everything, you would be lost,” Committee Member Laura Rosenthal wrote to The Malibu Times in a July email. Rosenthal is one of the three representatives of the Malibu side of the negotiations, separate from her position as a Malibu city council member.
The Unification Committee is tasked with negotiating how the district will divide every aspect of the current system. Some topics, such as the financials of revenue streams, can be hard to follow in layman’s terms. The meetings are open to the public but rarely have many visitors.
Since the exact date of separation is unknown, these difficult issues are further complicated by the committee’s attempts to predict future economic conditions. The numerous variables put into these projection models can create thousands of outcomes, which the committee is concerned may confuse the public who are looking for clear answers.
Committee member Manel Sweetmore opened the Unification Meeting on Thursday worried that months of committee meetings could be reduced to a single graph from several dozen-page reports and the assumption it summarized the entirety of the committee’s work.
“When you see numbers on a page, people take it as gospel without all the other nuances of it,” Sweetmore said.
This launched the discussion into ways of making the information more digestible for members of the public who would consume the dense information for the first time.
In response to this concern, the committee prioritized visual aids in their planned report that would show readers various potential outcomes. These assumptions will provide readers insight on what created a particular forecast.
The decision to include more information on how the prediction models were reached was universal in the committee, but not everyone agreed it was necessary.
“I feel like we don’t need to have 5,000 scenarios because, by definition, these are projections and they may or may not be met,” Committee Member Debbie Mulvaney said. “They’re only a basis for discussion because the reality is going to be based on what actually happens.”
Regardless of the thousands of potential outcomes, the actual separation will be based on numbers that the committee and the district will only know when the time of separation arrives.
“I think we all know that one thing that won’t happen is exactly what’s forecasted,” Sweetmore said.