Green MHS Roof Will Shift To Solar Collectors

At Malibu High School … original plans to provide a “green roof” of living plants on top of the front building are running into reality.

The original architectural plans were for a living roof … a garden on top of the building now arising on Morning View Drive.

A couple of problems with that…

Student safety … keeping kids off the slanted roof elements.

Employee safety … how do you keep groundskeepers from falling off.

And the engineering challenges of putting dirt … water and plants on top of a building.

The district is now scrapping the green roofs and instead going with solar panels.

It will cost about a quarter million dollars to change the plans … submit them to the state architects … and resubmit the plans to the California Coastal Commission.

And the school board will also confront the fact that student enrollment has dropped … perhaps requiring a resizing of plans to rebuild the campus.

A small adjustment in the half million dollar planning budget contract is proposed … to draw up program scenarios for reduced enrollment.

And the district is hiring human beings to do fire sentry duty.

Until fire pipes can be hooked up to Building E … unarmed security guards will patrol the school on a 24 hour basis.

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Traffic congestion at Malibu Elementary School on Point Dume … particularly at the afternoon student pickup time.

Volunteers and parent cooperation is being encouraged … to keep the gridlock to a minimum.

Tomorrow night … the school board will vote on a minor adjustment to its contract with traffic engineers.

The district will spend another 39 hundred dollars on a plan to evaluate the current situation … to see if the original traffic studies were correct … and if-not … to make recommendations.