Over protests of Malibu parents, the school district Board of Education plans a redistribution of funds raised in Malibu to Santa Monica.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
The school district Board of Education intends to move ahead with a plan to centralize fundraising in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, despite outcry from Malibu parents who say the change is basically a transfer of money from Malibu to Santa Monica. Parents say all that will happen is that Malibu people will stop giving or pull their children out of the school district and send them to private schools.
Six of the seven boardmembers, each of whom live in Santa Monica, expressed support for the measure at its regular meeting last Thursday following four hours of public comment from a record number of approximately 100 speakers. Boardmember Ralph Mechur abstained from the vote due to a conflict of interest. The board is scheduled for a final vote on the item at a special meeting Tuesday in Santa Monica.
The measure, called Districtwide Fundraising, would bar Parent Teacher Associations at individual school sites from raising money to pay for additional staff and programs specific to that school. Corporate gifts of greater than $2,500 would also be prohibited.
Large-scale fundraising instead would be conducted through the Santa Monica-Malibu Education Foundation, a nonprofit that has been raising money for the district for 29 years. Those funds would then be distributed equally to schools throughout the district. Individual PTAs could still raise money for educational supplies and other classroom necessities.
If approved, Superintendent Sandra Lyon would convene an advisory committee by Jan. 2012 to meet with other districts that had switched to the centralized fundraising model for advice on implementation of the policy. The committee would issue recommendations to the BOE by spring 2012. Implementation would begin in fall of 2013.
The policy would only apply at first to elementary schools, excluding secondary schools until current fundraising contracts with PTAs at those sites to expire.
The stated goal of districtwide fundraising, according to the district staff report, is “to supplement general funds so that underperforming students have the ability to reach the academic level of their not-at-risk peers.” Lyon also expressed concern that instructional aides and other personnel hired with PTA funds are often brought in without regard to the district’s broader educational direction, who the district then takes on as employees.
According to tax documents for 2009-10 cited by the district, Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School led the district in PTA fundraising per student, spending an additional $2,136.59 per student above what the district provides. At McKinley Elementary School in Santa Monica, with the lowest-funded PTA, $96.56 per student was spent above what the district provides.
Malibu parents acknowledged at the meeting that educational inequality existed within the district, but said the board’s first rule should be “do no harm.” They said the top six percent of donors at Malibu PTA, which they said account for 50 percent of overall giving, would enroll their students at private schools in protest if they could not give directly to their children’s public schools. If the Santa Monica-Education Foundation is unable to drastically ramp up its fundraising, the parents feared already successful programs in Malibu could be dismantled.
That concern was echoed by Cynthia Nixon, chair of the district’s Financial Oversight Committee (FOC).
“We would be very concerned with any change in policy that would have the unintended consequence of reducing funds to any of our students,” Nixon said on behalf of the FOC. “We believe that the new approach should be positive and should raise up the schools in the District that have fewer resources and not appear to punish those schools with relatively more resources.”
Boardmember Oscar de la Torre acknowledged “serious concerns” from Malibu residents, but said he supported the measure.
“This whole concept of a transfer of funds, that Malibu has nothing to gain from this policy, I don’t know what to say about that,” De la Torre said. “We were presented some data but I don’t know what to make of this information yet. But I just want to say that the direction for me is very clear.”
Superintendent Sandra Lyon said that while the district had not conducted extensive research into the details of implementation, if the board did not pass the item soon it could get bogged down for years
“I think the process was as we often do, was we come out with an idea and then we go to the community for the details,” Lyon said.
On Sunday, Webster Elementary Parent Craig Foster wrote on a blog set up by Malibu parents who have mobilized against the measure that he reluctantly believed a separate Malibu school district was the only permanent solution to continuing education disputes between Malibu and Santa Monica.
“At this point, I believe our obligation to the children in our schools is to consider a school structure independent of SMMUSD,” Foster wrote. “If we stay in SMMUSD, we risk forever being the unheard, unconsidered minority with not enough voice to influence school board policy or school board elections. Apparently, it will take a different structure for our voices [to] be heard, our children cherished, and their needs met. As a geographically isolated community that has progressed from town to city, we deserve no less.”
Meanwhile, an agenda item on the Malibu City Council’s regular meeting Monday-one day before the school board is to vote on the fundraising measure-is a proposal to begin a formal petition to create an independent Malibu school district. The goal, as stated in the staff report, is to build consensus between both the Malibu community and the SMMUSD Board of Education for a joint petition to bring to the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization. That body would then conduct a study into the feasibility of breaking up SMMUSD into separate Malibu and Santa Monica school districts.