by Mark McDermott
A Manhattan Beach citizens group is making an urgent push to collect enough signatures by Monday, February 14 to put a parcel tax increase on the June ballot.
The MB Citizens for Schools initiative, if successful, would raise an additional $12 million annually and provide every student within the Manhattan Beach Unified School District with $2,000 more in funding, bringing local students to what is calculated to be the necessary amount for essential education.
“This is a complete game changer,” said Wysh Weinstein, the MBUSD PTA Council president and co-chair, with Angie Smith, of the citizens’ group. “That’s the phrase we’ve been using — the way we do this is a game changer, the way we get this done is a game changer, and most importantly the impact this will have for students is a game changer. I mean, I have been a volunteer since my kids were in preschool, and I have helped with many, many different things at all different levels. This feels like the most important thing we will ever do.”
The way the MB Citizens for Schools intends to address MBUSD needs is to finally secure a sustainable source of locally-controlled funding for an entire generation of students — the tax would last for a dozen years — in order to finally take away the year-to-year uncertainty that has come with the vicissitudes of state funding.
“The system is so broken in California, in terms of public education funding,” said Michael Sinclair, who serves on the Grandview Elementary PTA as its legislative representative, and is part of the citizens’ initiative group. “But what if we can really bring some local control to Manhattan Beach and a stable source of funding for a full generation of Manhattan Beach students? That is what we are trying to do.”
MBUSD receives $11,070 in per-pupil funding from state and federal funding. The state average is $13,152, and the national average is $15,114. Local support, including grants from the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation and the previous $225 parcel tax approved by voters in 2018, brings per pupil funding to $13,622. Considering the cost of living in California, and particularly Manhattan Beach, this means that per pupil funding is at least $2,000 below what it costs to provide education for MBUSD students. The MB Citizens for Schools initiative would increase the local parcel tax to $1,095 per parcel in order to provide $2,000 additional funding for each student.
“We’re going for adequate funding,” Weinstein said. “We’re not going for anything crazy. Residents without kids in school might not initially understand what we are doing, because they may think this does not directly impact them. But every child should have access to an adequate public education, and if you live in this town, wouldn’t you want that for your neighbor?”
Hilary Mahan, the executive director of MBEF, has been immersed in school funding issues for 15 years. MBEF is one of the most robust education foundations in the state and possibly the nation, providing grants totaling $85 million to MBUSD schools since its founding four decades ago. But Mahan said MBEF cannot keep up with the funding needs of local schools. Her research indicates that per pupil funding needs to increase by $2,000 in order to simply be adequate.
“The way we got to what is adequate is research based on what it costs to run a school, what it costs to really meet the needs of students on a per pupil basis, and studies through the California State School Board Association, and research through the Public Policy Institute of California,” Mahan said. “All have indicated that state funding in California is extremely low and MBUSD is far lower than even that norm. What the research suggests is that about 38 percent more funding is needed on the whole to create a robust learning environment for students.”
MBEF, along with district and initiative leaders, took a deep dive to arrive at what would be required to meet actual needs.
“We cannot continue with this influx of up and down, pink slips issued to teachers and whatnot,” Mahan said. “What is our goal? What is our vision for what we want to create for students here? We identified lower class sizes, competitive salaries for teachers to keep people here longer, and to be able to support our kids, more professional development, more money for programs that support learning for students that go into the future, creating a pathway for students, which are higher-level opportunities for students — but also having more adults on hand to be able to reach students at all levels and really support all the students. So it’s looking at, how do we create a situation that benefits every kid, wherever they are on the spectrum of learning? So that’s where the number $2,000 comes from.”
The district has been investigating renewing or increasing the parcel tax passed in 2018. Polling conducted late last year included a lot of very positive data, including the fact that MBUSD is more highly regarded by local residents at present than it was a year ago, despite the challenges of the pandemic and the ongoing culture wars that have targeted this and many other school districts over issues of race, diversity, and equity. Polling data also showed support for a ballot measure extending or increasing a parcel tax — 63 percent of residents supported extending the current parcel tax, which generates $3 million a year for local schools and expires in 2024, while 53 percent supported increasing the parcel tax by $525 annually in order to generate $8.2 million annually. After a board discussion of the matter on January 12, Sinclair began investigating what other school districts were doing with parcel taxes and discovered two things — that the highest performing districts, such as Palo Alto and Laguna Beach, have much higher parcel taxes that contributed a much bigger percentage to school budgets, and that newly settled law meant that citizen-led initiatives did not require a supermajority, 66 percent voter approval, but instead 50 percent plus 1. These two realizations, along with the polling data, reframed how a parcel tax could help MBUSD.
“When we started to dig into this, it was really shifting the conversation,” Sinclair said. “In my mind, I thought, ‘Okay, well, what happens if we shift the conversation from what can we do to what do we actually need?”
The MB Citizen’s for Schools initiative would double the parcel tax contribution to the annual budget from 3 percent to 6 percent. The $1,095 tax represents $3 per day, and those who are financially unable to meet the cost would be eligible for exemptions. The tax wouldn’t solve every funding gap the district faces — increasing retirement costs, projected decreasing state Average Daily Attendance funding, and a significant decline in student enrollment — but would make those challenges more bridgeable.
Difficulties will remain regardless. Nearly every change made to state funding of education for the last four decades has worked against MBUSD, beginning in 1978 with the loss of local control over property tax revenue that historically funded schools. More recently, former Governor Jerry Brown’s reformation of state education funding, known as the Local Control Funding Formula, increased funding overall but targeted schools with the highest percentage of socioeconomically challenged students, worsening MBUSD’s state funding gap, because Manhattan Beach has fewer of these students than almost any other district in the state. A budget presentation by MBUSD assistant superintendent Dawnalyn Murakawa-Leopard at a January 28 budget workshop included a 52 slide PowerPoint that showed increasing costs and declining revenues in nearly every aspect of district financing. By the February 2 board meeting, the citizen initiative was already forming. Sinclair told the board that night that his father had been a public school teacher for 40 years and that the district’s dire financial straits brought to mind one of his father’s oft-repeated admonitions.
“He passed on to me a saying that he loved, that there are two things that we can offer to children, truth and hope,” Sinclair said. “And it’s only when you encounter truth at its harshest and hope at its most powerful that you can then believe dramatic change is possible.”
That dramatic change, Sinclair said, is finally giving MBUSD secure, locally controlled funding. Mahan said that she believed that residents will support such a change.
“In my experience here in Manhattan Beach, I’ve always known our community to really rally around good solutions that create a pathway to make things happen,” Mahan said. “And that’s exactly what’s happening here. We have known that there is a structural deficit in school funding for years and we have attempted to support our schools in any way that we can. This new opportunity, and the group MB Citizens for Schools, truly epitomizes that effort and that ability to truly come together united around an issue. This is a solution to a long-term problem. We know there are many short-term problems to solve — parents or community members, hoping that the mask mandate will go away, or even parents concerned about the curriculum. But this is a long-term solution that will help support all of our efforts to better fund and maintain high-quality schools here. It’s something we can all agree on.”
Weinstein said the time to make it happen is now. More than 100 volunteers have joined the urgent effort to collect 3,000 signatures by Monday, which represents more than the 10 percent of the electorate needed to get the initiative on the ballot. The priority, she said, is to pass the ballot measure in June, rather than the more crowded and politicized ballot in November.
“I don’t even know the right adjective to describe this timeline and the sense of urgency,” Weinstein said. “I mean, we only have until Sunday night. This is it.”
See the MB Citizens for Schools page on Facebook for more information. ER
