by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Education has selected Dr. Kimberlie Linz as the district’s next superintendent, pending contract negotiations and final board approval.
Board President Tina Shivpuri, in announcing the selection on Monday, said that Linz’s transparent style of communication and seasoned record of executive experience made her a standout candidate.
“The Board is grateful for the meaningful contributions of our entire community, whose insights were instrumental in defining the qualities we sought in our next superintendent,” Shivpuri said in a statement. “We are privileged to bring forward Dr. Linz as our finalist, a leader who embodies those shared priorities and a strong vision for MBUSD’s future.”
Linz has been an educator for nearly three decades and spent ten years as a principal at Pacific Elementary and Manhattan Beach Middle School. She left MBUSD to serve as El Segundo’s Chief Business Officer in 2018.
“I am incredibly honored to be selected as the finalist to serve as the next Superintendent in Manhattan Beach,” Linz said in the district’s official statement. “MBUSD is a special place with a legacy of excellence, a dedicated governing board, engaged families, amazing staff, and incredible students. To have the opportunity to serve in the community that helped shape me as a leader is deeply meaningful on both a personal and professional level.”
Linz emerged from a field of 28 applicants and four finalists. Shivpuri, in an interview, recalled a moment in the interview process that particularly resonated.
The board, Shivpuri explained, had devised a scenario for finalists: imagine it is the first day of school and you are walking into a special education advisory meeting — thirty or forty parents, a handful of principals and cabinet members, the board present — in order to speak to the group as superintendent. You have eight to ten minutes.
“That is where she was able to share with us her gift,” Shivpuri said. “One of her many superpowers, which is communication.”
What struck the board wasn’t polish. It was her authenticity. Linz began her career as a special education teacher, earning a master’s in special education from the University of Virginia before moving to California.
“Once a special education teacher, always a special education teacher,” Linz told the board. What she meant, she explained later, is that the lens never leaves you — every decision filtered through the question of how it affects students who learn differently, students whose needs don’t fit neatly into the standard educational journey.
“I just firmly believe that we’re always looking at decisions through that lens of how it affects our entire student population,” Linz said in an interview Wednesday.
It was, Shivpuri said, exactly what the board was looking for, and more than they expected.
“She’s book smart and finance smart, but what shined — what allowed us to see these two sides, two strengths — was her empathy,” Shivpuri said. “In the two days of interviews, she was able to answer our questions from that lens….Matched with her CBO experience, how she owns the room and at the same time listens, how carefully she listened to our questions and how carefully she responded — that’s what bubbled her to the top.”
For Linz, the selection represents a deliberate homecoming. She began preparing to apply as soon as Superintendent John Bowes announced his retirement last November. The decade she spent as a site leader in Manhattan Beach, from 2008 to 2018, was a formative period for Linz.
“That’s where I learned a lot of my leadership skills, especially at the site level,” Linz said. “I had great mentorship there and got to work with the community really closely, and really came to understand a community that’s very connected to the schools.”
Linz’s return to MBUSD, then, is a full circle moment. Her experience in Manhattan Beach prepared her to become a district-wide leader in El Segundo, and her subsequent eight years there served to fully prepare her to take the helm at MBUSD.
“I’ve grown,” she said. “My leadership has evolved in the last eight years as a district leader to look at things from a wider lens and focus even more on what’s important to the community, and how we connect the budget and our student needs and our student outcomes long term.”
“It feels wonderful to come back. I loved working in the Manhattan Beach community when I was there before. I’m very grateful to the El Segundo community, who also welcomed me in the last eight years. But going back to Manhattan Beach feels a lot like going back home.”
She grew up in a small town in Wisconsin and said she has always sought out communities where schools sit at the center of civic life.
“I benefited from growing up in a small community where everybody knew each other, where schools were kind of at the center of the community, and I’ve really tried to work in communities like that throughout my career,” Linz said. “Manhattan Beach is just the epitome of that. It feels very much like home. Everybody knows each other, everybody cares about our students and their successes. Working in a community that is connected to the schools as a whole, and our student success in general, is what drew me back. Also, it’s a community of excellence — there are high standards, and high community involvement, and that’s what I was looking for in the superintendency.”
She is slated to begin July 1, pending contract approval at the April 29 board meeting, following a formal vote on her employment at the April 14 meeting.
Linz will step into her leadership role at a challenging time for MBUSD. Last month, the board authorized 58.85 possible employee layoffs, including over 40 teachers. Some of those layoffs could be rescinded, depending on the outcome of the state’s budget process and local fundraising efforts, but the larger financial picture for MBUSD is, as Trustee Wysh Weinstein remarked last year, “bleak, and getting bleaker.” This is both because part of the state’s funding mechanism, the Local Control Funding Formula, is weighted towards districts with higher percentages of economically disadvantaged and English language learning students, which has made MBUSD chronically underfunded — per student, one of the lowest funded unified school districts in all of California — while the basic grants that underlie the LCFF funding have also failed to keep up with increasing costs across the board, including insurance, retirement, materials, and unfunded mandates such as special education. MBUSD already laid off 31 employees a year ago, and despite reductions still faces the threat of a structural budget deficit going forward. To further worsen matters, a recent survey revealed a disconnect between the community’s perception of the district’s financial plight and its reality.
The polling, conducted by FM3 Research in February, found that only 48 percent of likely Manhattan Beach voters believe the district has a great or some need for additional funding. The irony embedded in that number, as polling consultant Sharon Pinkerton put it at the February board meeting, is that the district’s own excellence is working against it.
“The success masks the ability to recognize the need for more funding,” Pinkerton said.
The survey tested a proposed parcel tax of $216 annually — roughly $18 a month, with a senior exemption — and found just 48 percent support, well short of the two-thirds threshold required for passage. Among voters who believe the district has a great need for more money, 86 percent said they would vote yes. Among those who see no real need, 79 percent said they would vote no. Such a measure lives or dies, in other words, on whether voters understand what is actually happening inside the budget.
That communication challenge is precisely where Linz’s selection takes on its fullest significance. Shivpuri noted that the board was not simply looking for an experienced administrator — it was looking for a leader suited to this particular moment, in this particular community.
“Our community is sophisticated,” Shivpuri said. “A lot of our parents are executives and doctors. They’re in rooms in their workplace and in their industries where communication and style of communicating — getting something done, putting goals forward — it’s just natural. And I think that’s the expectation that they have of us, of the leadership of the district, the board and cabinet. So those expectations are very high.”
Communication has been a standing board goal at MBUSD for years — a fact that Shivpuri acknowledged carries its own implicit critique.
“Sometimes I think, well, that’s like the kitchen sink — communication is so critical, why is it even a board goal? It should be understood, it should be assumed,” Shivpuri said. “But my fellow board members reminded me that it’s been a request of our families over and over and over, predating Dr. Bowes. We’re getting better at it, and we’re going to continue to get better at it.”
That’s where Linz comes in. In the interview process, Shivpuri said, she demonstrated not just the ability to speak to a room, but the ability to read one — to answer questions from the lens of a parent as much as an administrator, and to make people feel genuinely heard. A key aspect of a superintendent’s role in the community, Shivpuri said, is to act as a “skilled convener” — not just of meetings, of which there are of course many, but in bringing people together.
“We are looking for someone who is proactive,” Shivpuri said. “Maybe as superintendent you don’t have all the answers, but you know how to be strategic, who to bring in, and how to facilitate … Particularly with our main partners, MBX, PTA, MBEF, city leaders, the Beach Cities Health District. So that is a skill, as well as knowing what is important, versus working in silos.”
They also sought a thoughtful listener who knows how to build trust and relationships. One moment stood out to Shivpuri: in describing her leadership approach, Linz talked about what it means to greet someone on a classroom visit, or in the minutes before a meeting officially gets underway.
“She said, ‘How’s your mom doing? I remember last time we talked you mentioned she was just out of the hospital. How’s your daughter? I remember she’s about to graduate,'” Shivpuri recalled. “It was very authentic and genuine. It wasn’t a canned response. She wasn’t just giving us the answers we wanted to hear.”
That relational quality, Shivpuri said, is inseparable from the practical work of solving hard problems. When people know each other — really know each other — they start from a place of trust, and trust compresses the time it takes to get things done.
One concrete signal of Linz’s approach: when asked in the interview process about transparency and the budget, she immediately proposed forming a budget advisory committee. It was, Shivpuri said, exactly what she had been thinking.
“She said, it’s all public information,” Shivpuri recalled. “The first thing I would do is form a budget advisory committee.’ Just like we have a bond oversight committee, this would be an opportunity to share in more exhaustive detail — and that way you have a broader number of people in the community saying, I understand it, I’ve researched it alongside the district.”
Linz said a budget advisory committee is central to her vision for closing the gap between what district leadership knows and what the community understands.
“Because we are reliant so much more on local funding than many other districts, bringing the community into the solution is a really important next step forward,” she said.
In the near term, she said, that means getting out — visibly, consistently, in person. This isn’t just about the budget, but about being fully in touch with the community, and allowing this to inform all decisions.
“I’m a big believer in face-to-face communication,” Linz said. “In communities where there’s a lot of involvement, people want to know their superintendent by the first name. They want to run into them at events and know that they’re connected not just to the schools, but to the community as a whole. Visibility is a big part of communication, because if people know where I am and can have those face-to-face conversations, then I’m getting real information.”
She also signaled a deliberate effort to reach beyond the usual voices. “Being strategic in reaching out to voices that maybe we don’t typically hear from, and giving multiple venues for input from the community, is a really good next step forward,” she said.
Shivpuri, for her part, is already thinking about living rooms.
“She also envisioned whatever sort of necessary roadshow, creating a series of in-home sessions, information meet-and-greets,” Shivpuri said. “Visibility and accessibility as well as transparency — she exuded all of those things.”
The reaction inside the district to Linz’s selection has been, by Shivpuri’s account, immediate and emphatic. When the announcement went out Monday morning, Shivpuri’s phone filled with messages — emojis, exclamation points, “great pick.” Some of the calls she received were from current MBUSD teachers and principals who had worked under Linz when she was their principal. Several said that Linz had been a key mentor. One told Shivpuri that Linz was the reason she had become a principal.
“I didn’t even know that,” Shivpuri said. “Some of these folks whose voices really mattered to me, were actually thumbs-upping her after the fact. That wave of excitement, I think, is going to carry us through to this next chapter.”
For Linz, the weight of the moment isn’t lost. She knows what she is walking into — the layoffs, the depleted reserves, the parcel tax math, the community that loves its schools and hasn’t yet grasped how close to the financial edge they are. She said she isn’t running from any of it. Neither, Shivpuri said, is the board.
“We’re not the people to run away from problems,” Shivpuri said. “We want to run into the fire. And that was Kim, too — she knows what’s happening, and that’s something she wants to work on with us.”
“Part of my role when I first come into the district is really to reintroduce myself to the community,” Linz said. “And part of that is making sure that I’m listening to what’s important to the community. The budget has been a big part of the conversation in Manhattan Beach especially this spring. The best way for me to get information about what’s important is to listen.”
She holds a doctorate in educational leadership from USC, completed last May, and an AI leadership certification from the California Association of School Board Officials earned last August — credentials she pursued while simultaneously managing El Segundo’s budget and its $92 million bond program. And she was not only a well-respected CBO within El Segundo — she was recognized as the best in the state. In 2023, the Association of California School Administrators named her its California Business Official of the Year, citing her students-first approach to fiscal oversight and her ability to maintain the district’s financial health while keeping teaching and learning at the center of every budget decision. The Los Angeles County Office of Education gave her the same honor at the county level that same year. Former ESUSD Superintendent Melissa Moore, in remarks accompanying the award, noted that Linz “combines a passion for education with an in-depth understanding of school finance” and credited her with ensuring that the district’s budgets consistently reflected its educational priorities.
Linz and her husband David have a 10-month-old puppy named Simi. They run, paddleboard, and hike. They are, in every sense, South Bay people — and come July, Manhattan Beach people again.
“I’m really looking forward to getting back out in the community and reintroducing myself,” she said. “I hope that people will not be afraid to stop me on the street, or introduce themselves to me as I’m out and about.”
Linz’s imminent arrival has already given the MBUSD community a much-needed sense of fresh hope.
“We are so thrilled,” Shivpuri said. “Everything’s moving in the right direction.”ER
