Down the street, the daughters of school board member Bill Fournell were in mourning. What had portended to be the election of the nation’s first female president, and perhaps the dawning of new era in which women more equally shared the mantle of leadership, had been dashed.
Jeff Serota, co-chair of the campaign and part of a key committee of eight volunteers who had steered school bonds Measure EE and Measure C to victory, called the gathering at his Tree Section home Tuesday night “a condolence party.” His wife, Peir, retired early in the evening to contemplate what the national election meant.
But it was a celebration nonetheless. The $114 million Measure C, intended to vastly upgrade school safety at all Manhattan Beach Unified School District campuses, had garnered 70 percent support among local voters; the $39 million Measure EE, slated to rebuild the aged, deteriorating Fisher Gym at the heart of the Mira Costa campus, won 67 percent approval.
“Locally,” said MBUSD board president Ellen Rosenberg, “we prevailed. We are doing the right thing for our community, and for our students.”
Superintendent Michael Matthews was emphatically grateful for the night’s outcome and what it meant for MBUSD students.
“It was fantastic to celebrate with the people who worked so hard to make this happen,” Matthews said. “It’s a win for our whole community. And I can’t wait to see what this does for our community.”
The two bonds, which were separated in order to provide greater transparency in terms of the specific needs each would address and the associated costs, will remake two aspects of district campuses, safety and athletics, that had largely been overlooked by previous bonds focused on classrooms and technology to bolster academic performance.
But as the campaign’s communication director Leasa Ireland noted, most district campuses are seven decades old, while Fisher Gym was built in 1951. Ireland said she first did a full walkthrough of the gym last summer and was stunned to find non-functional showers in the women’s locker room, no public restrooms, broken staircases, and a generally dilapidated state that made the facility feel like the land that time forgot.
“I myself was shocked….You just can’t believe the state it’s in,” Ireland said. “It’s just not okay. It’s not acceptable.”
“And to have this in juxtaposition to the finest sports program in California — it doesn’t make sense,” Matthews said.
The district commissioned a facilities assessment and long range master plan in 2015 which found campuses in need of more than $300 million in upgrades. MBUSD leadership decided to take a piece-by-piece approach, beginning with these two bonds. Their passage does not exhaust the district’s bonding capacity. Going into the election, MBUSD had a school district property assessment rate of $70.5 per $100,000 of assessed value, higher than neighboring Hermosa, but lower than Redondo and El Segundo. The new bonds will raise assessment rate by about $30.
The safety concerns Measure C addresses go far beyond better fencing and security equipment and in some cases may entirely reorient campuses, repairing and rebuilding outdated elementary and preschool classrooms, including new electrical systems, plumbing, roofing, doors, lighting, windows, and seismic retrofitting. Aging temporary classrooms will be replaced with permanent new multipurpose rooms and middle school music classrooms will be expanded to allow more student participation.
“These bonds are not the pretty things that a lot of people think of when they think of remodels and renovations,” said school board member Karen Komatinsky. “It’s the backbone, it’s the important stuff — it’s the electrical and plumbing and earthquake safety. It’s all that critical stuff that people don’t really like to talk about all that much.”
Matthews said that nothing can absolutely prevent safety issues from arising — Sandy Hook Elementary, he noted, was a very well-designed campus — but that improvements would make campuses as safe as current technology allows.
“Sixty and seventy year old buildings don’t make sense, in terms of safety, in today’s world,” Matthews said. “But this will maximize safety. All we can do is do everything we can to make our schools as safe as possible.”
Meanwhile, the restoration of Fisher Gym will both give the district a state-of-the-art sports facility and give Mira Costa High School a highly symbolic makeover. Matthews said that in important respects, the high school is the city’s center — a place where kids, parents and grandparents share fond memories and where more people congregate daily than any other place in the city. He said all district sports facilities are also used community-wide, so the upgrade is both good for students and residents who don’t have kids who are students.
“This is a win for everybody,” Matthews said.
This was also part of the challenge of the campaign. As Ireland noted, only a third of voters, or about 6,700 families, have students in local schools. The larger voter turnout that came with the presidential election meant that many of those voters without kids would be voting and needed information regarding what the bonds would do. The campaign, utilizing 360 volunteers, conducted two neighborhood walks and extensive phone banking, Ireland said, in total reaching 7,000 voters.
“We couldn’t wait any longer,” Rosenberg said. “The time had come to take care of our schools.”
And so on an election night in which the spirits of many local voters were dampened by national concerns, MBUSD supporters took solace in successfully taking steps to insure their kids get the safest and best education possible.
“The community spoke tonight, and we are lucky, and thankful, and appreciative,” Komatinsky said. “It’s a classic ‘It takes a village to raise a village’ kind of thing. This community is such an unusual one in that when there is a need, this community bands together and makes unusual things happen. It’s why we live in this small town.” ER
