SMMUSD Schedules Vote On Malibu Split, But Malibu Will Ask County To OK Original, Harsher Terms

Santa Monica school board members have again taken preliminary steps to sign an agreement with Malibu to allow a school district divorce.

By a 7-0 vote, board members agreed to devote most of an entire meeting in April to go over the negotiated agreement to split the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District into two parts.

The special meeting will be on April 23.

Despite the negotiated settlement, the city is pressing ahead with its original divorce petition, which will be heard by a county committee in a week and a half.  That petition is much less financially-lucrative to Santa Monica.

Malibu city council member Marianne Riggins aummed up the Malibu position: in a voice that sounded fatigued

71090 RIGGINS LOCAL   

“I’m looking to rebuild my town.

“In 2018 we lost over 400 homes.

“Now we’ve lost over 700. It’s almost one fourth to one third of our community.

“We need something to get families to move back to our community … and that’s local control of our schools.”

Last November, the city reactivated its push to split Malibu out of the Santa Monica-controlled school system.  The city council was frustrated, they said, that the Santa Monica school board was again delaying its response to the city’s original divorce papers, which were served in 2017.

Malibu parents have been trying for five decades to undo the 150-year-old accident of history that left Malibu a part of Santa Monica schools, with a chunk of Los Angeles city schools in between.

Although rural Malibu had at first benefitted from sending its kids to Santa Monica schools, the tide had long ago shifted as tax revenues flowed from Malibu to Santa Monica, while Santa Monica let Malibu schools fall apart.

Elizabeth Riddick … a Malibu mother and city planning commissioner … told the school board that Malibu and Santa Monica can both afford the divorce.

71092 RIDDICK MAL SCHOOL

“I know finances are important, but I think our children are more important.

“And the parents in Malibu are strong and the children are strong and we are bring choked out.

“So please – give us our freedom so we can have our student body back.

“A lot of our parents aren’t sending their kids to our public schools because we don’t have local control.”

Years of talks had produced a compromise that would have seen Malibu taxpayers continue to substantially subsidize Santa Monica schools, similar to current tax formulas that currently send tens of millions of dollars from Malibu property tax receipts to Santa Monica campuses.

But Malibu negotiators walked away from the compromise, and went back to the original terms of the 2017 petition, which was financially less-generous to Santa Monica.

At the school board meeting last week in Malibu, Santa Monica board member Jon Kean said the negotiated agreement should be adopted .. not the original petition.

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“We’ve pretty much agreed from the beginning that a mediated solution where your arm and arm is the best path forward and we have worked tirelessly to do that. We have gotten a little sidetracked in the past few months.”

But the city council had enough with the endless Santa Monica delays … and pressed forward for the original divorce petition to be heard soon.

The six agreements between Malibu and Santa Monica have yet to be publicized.

Kean says that will happen soon.

71094 KEAN FINALIZED

“These finalized agreements will be made available to the public with ample time before that meeting for them to explore that and I do believe and reiterate, I believe that the mediate solution is the way we get this done as quickly as possible, and with the least pushback from from Sacramento.”

Pushback in Sacramento may include organized labor .. the employees unions … who have questions about how teachers and service workers will be handled.

Last week’s meeting of the Santa Monica school board was in Malibu … a rare occurrence since the Covid epidemic.

School separation advocate Wade Major … at last week’s meeting … noted that the school board had traveled out to Malibu City Hall for the meeting last week – an ordeal all too familiar to Malibu residents.

71091 MAJOR HELL

“I wanna thank you for being here …. because I know that the commute was hell.

“Because I went to the burn area six times today already myself, so whether you went around the valley or through (the Malibu burn zone), I know what you went through.”

Major lost his family home on Big Rock in the January 6 fire.