The real deal: Dr. Michael Matthews pursues excellence at Manhattan Beach Unified
Manhattan Beach Unified School District Superintendent Michael Matthews. Photo by Tom Sanders A picture of Dr. Michael Matthews has hung in teacher Nicole Lusiani Elliott’s San Lorenzo High School classroom for the past 15 years. Elliott often points to the portrait and tells her students about the man who changed her life. “I tell my kids, ‘I’m here because of him,’” Elliott said of Matthews, who in July became Manhattan Beach Unified School District’s Superintendent. “I became a teacher because of him. No doubt.” Elliott — who teaches the same course that Matthews taught at SLHS — grew up in the mostly blue collar town of San Lorenzo, an unincorporated town on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. In the late ‘80s, she attended SLHS, from which two percent of students went on to college at the time. Elliott was the self-dubbed “fun girl, not smart girl” from a single-parent home with no expectation of going to college. Early on, she had vague notions of becoming a teacher, but had no role models she could look up to. By the time she reached high school, she had lost all expectations of becoming a teacher or going into any profession that required a college degree. But…
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