The move comes after a heated exchange between local leaders and school district board members.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
The future of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District appears to be under serious review after leaders in Malibu and Santa Monica this week stated they were open to breaking into separate districts.
Malibu City Councilmember Lou La Monte got a green light from his colleagues at Monday night’s council meeting for he and Mayor Pro Tem Laura Rosenthal to explore the logistics of an independent Malibu school district. On Tuesday, Ben Allen, vice president of the SMMUSD Board of Education, told The Malibu Times he thought it was a good idea.
La Monte’s request to consider an independent school district came four days after a blunt exchange between Malibu education activists and the board at its first meeting in Malibu since May. At that meeting, multiple speakers expressed frustration that none of the seven members of the Board of Education were Malibu residents, despite Malibu students comprising approximately 20 percent of the district’s student population. Malibu has not had a representative on the board since Kathy Wisnicki declined to run for re-election in 2008.
La Monte and others demanded that Malibu be given a permanent advisory seat on the board so that Malibu’s voice could be heard.
The seat would operate similar to the student representatives for Santa Monica, Malibu and Olympic High Schools, who are allowed to cast unofficial votes and speak for longer than the three minutes allotted to the public. The advisory position would not be able to sit in on closed session meetings of the board.
“All we’re asking for is the right to sit there and just have our comments heard,” La Monte said. “You don’t have to count our votes at all.”
If the board does not entertain the option of an advisory vote, La Monte said members of the Malibu community might take the matter to court.
The next day, board Vice President Allen was quoted in the Santa Monica Daily Press as saying, “I just think that, in the long term, these representation issues are never going to go away.” Allen continued, saying that as Malibu grows “as a community, and as Malibu has more experience as a separate political entity, it makes more and more sense for them to go out on their own.”
At Monday’s city council meeting, La Monte requested that Malibu consider doing just that. He added he was prompted to investigate the potential for an independent Malibu school district after reading the quotation by Allen.
On Tuesday, Allen told The Malibu Times he stood by his comment.
“Lou came to us and said that if you don’t want to do this, we’re ready to break up the district,” Allen said. “And I think he now realizes that there’s actually a lot of interest on the part of the board, and folks in Santa Monica, to break up the district.”
Allen said that while a transition to separate districts would be a major undertaking and is by no means inevitable, it could be streamlined by the fact that both communities contribute significant funding to the district, “because you don’t have a situation where one side would be left with a particularly short end of the stick.”
But board member Ralph Mechur said while it was a natural idea for Malibu to have its own school district, it would be “unfair to agree to something without having a thorough analysis.”
Still he did not discourage the Malibu City Council from studying the matter.
“If the community of Malibu feels that it’s something that should be looked at, sure,” Mechur said. “There’s no harm in exploring ideas for what is the viability.”
Malibu Mayor Pro Tem Laura Rosenthal echoed Mechur’s caution, but said the time was ripe to consider the possibility.
“I think it’s a really good time to look at whether it would be feasible,” said Rosenthal, who three years ago helped lead an unsuccessful petition drive to accomplish the same goal. “No one knows whether it would be a good idea, because no one I know has done the analysis.”
Relations between the school district board and Malibu have cooled in recent years after several controversies.
Earlier this year, a drive to turn Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School into a charter school was rejected by the board, and ultimately by the county.