District staff estimate a $3.5 million operational deficit for Santa Monica if Malibu secedes. But Malibu activists say they are perplexed at how the figures were arrived at.
By Jimy Tallal / Special to The Malibu Times
With the school district Board of Education set to discuss the financial implications of Malibu and Santa Monica dividing into separate districts on Thursday at Malibu City Hall, the district’s financial staff on Monday released an estimate projecting a $3.5 million deficit for an independent Santa Monica school district should Malibu separate. The projection was met with disappointment among Malibu education activists, who say they do not know how the district arrived at the numbers, and have been prevented from working with them collaboratively.
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) Board of Education is scheduled to meet Thursday at Malibu City Hall at 6 p.m. to discuss the prospect of a split. The board decided at its March 1 meeting to study the prospect of a split at the request of the Malibu City Council and citizen group Advocates for Malibu Public Schools (AMPS).
SMMUSD Superintendent Sandra Lyon said Tuesday the estimate provided by staff in the report did not mean that staff was recommending against a separation.
“We’re not making a recommendation one way or the other. We’re going to present the data and the information and we’ll draw some conclusions from there,” Lyon said. “We wanted to make sure that what we could get was accurate as possible and enough for the board to make an informed decision.”
But Malibu parent Craig Foster, who has been heavily involved with AMPS’ drive to explore the possibility, said he did not understand how the district arrived at its numbers, or why it refused offers from AMPS to pay for consultants and study the process jointly.
“It’s very difficult to comment on their numbers because we haven’t been part of this exploration,” Foster said. “And what we have been asking for from beginning of exploration is to partner with them to work through the numbers and find the best mutually satisfactory solution…By them doing numbers independently we can’t participate, and the process breaks down because those numbers don’t make sense to us.”
According to the staff report, staff received two quotes from consulting firms about studying the financial implications of a potential split. One was a full feasibility study costing more than $39,000 and a narrower study would have addressed revenue and bonding changes at a cost of $9,000. But according to staff, neither proposal answered the “specific budget impact on the remaining Santa Monica Unified School District.”
The staff instead opted to run the financial numbers in house, with the help of its financial advisor, Keygent.
After deducting the staff and maintenance costs for the current Malibu schools, the staff looked at overhead costs such as human resources, purchasing, health services and other staff at the district headquarters whose services were applied districtwide and not to a particular school. The staff determined that the departure of Malibu from the district would cause a $3.5 million deficit in these overhead costs. Making up that deficit would require a 23.3% reduction in overhead costs, according to the staff report.
SMMUSD Board of Education president Ben Allen told The Malibu Times in an email before the staff report was released that Thursday’s meeting would be about exploring the options available.
“There are so many issues at play here—the economies of scale in running a school district, local control, equitable distribution of shared bond indebtedness, Malibu’s loss of Santa Monica sales taxes and city funds, the potential loss of the parcel tax, labor negotiations, county and state approval, etc,” Allen wrote. “Thursday’s meeting will be a chance for us to get our heads around some of the numbers.”
Writing to The Malibu Times before the staff report was released, Foster emphasized that the process was not “us versus them,” and expressed the wish to work collaboratively with the school district. But on Tuesday he admitted he was perplexed why district staff and the school board had resisted offers from Malibu activists to pay for mutually agreed upon consultants to study the numbers. The school board, acting on staff’s recommendation, refused the offer of Malibu parents paying for consultants at its March 1 meeting to avoid, several said, the impression they were lending their support to breaking up the districts. But Foster said that would have been better than doing it without including Malibu activists in the number crunching.
“We offered to pay for the consultants, so I don’t quite understand why they didn’t do it,” Foster said. “There aren’t your numbers and my numbers, there’s just the numbers. So we just want to work with the numbers to ascertain whether two districts are viable. Based on what we know, they are.”
On Thursday, staff will provide estimates for projected budgets of a Malibu Unified School District and a Santa Monica Unified School District.