EDUCATION: Manhattan Beach Unified School District adopts budget, cuts 31 employee positions
by Mark McDermott The Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Education last week adopted a balanced budget for the next fiscal year. But that balance was scarcely achieved — with a mere $54,000 projected left over in the General Fund’s remaining balance, in the context of a $100 million budget — and came at the expense of 31 employee positions and a perilously depleting dip into district emergency reserves. The budget was adopted without comment at a short special meeting on June 20, after a longer discussion on June 18. On that night, school board president Wysh Weinstein did not mince words about the situation the district finds itself in. “We’ve been talking about this for a while,” she said. “And it’s been bleak, and getting bleaker.” For the last half decade the story of the Manhattan Beach Unified School District’s unusually fraught financial situation has been told many times — during the multiple campaigns for the Measure MB parcel tax, during the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation’s ongoing fundraising drives, and every year, during the budget adoption process. MBUSD is chronically underfunded, primarily due to the state education funding mechanism, the Local…
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