by Mark McDermott
The good news when local voters approved Measure RLS last November was that Manhattan Beach Unified School District campuses would receive over $200 million in infrastructure improvements. The more difficult aspect of the influx of funds, however, was that a facilities master plan completed prior to the bond measure’s passage identified $488 million in needed upgrades.
The MBUSD Board of Education last week dove into those difficulties. The school board, at its Nov. 19 meeting, made critical decisions about which projects will move forward and which will wait for a future bond measure.
Among the most significant decisions involved Mira Costa High School’s aging swimming pool. After hearing from an emphatic aquatics community and reviewing the facility’s condition, the board faced two options — to rebuild the current 35-meter pool or create a new 50-meter competition pool.
“We have heard a lot of public comment from the swim community, and probably this is going to be our only opportunity in the next 30 years to make a replacement on that pool,” said Cathey Graves, board vice president. “And so do we return it to a 35-meter pool, or do we listen to our constituents, and go to the 50 meter pool?”
The answer was unanimous among the board members that a new 50-meter pool should be built, which cost $8.7 million more than upgrading the existing pool. The new pool will cost an estimated $18 million.
“This is a 30 year investment,” said board trustee Jen Fenton. “Our community is saying we need it. We had people show up.”
“Water seems to be a need in not just the school community, but even in the larger community,” said board trustee Jen Dohner. “So that is a one piece that feels important to think about. The larger community serves our community.”
The larger pool will allow varsity and junior varsity teams to practice simultaneously, reducing scheduling conflicts that currently force students to arrive very early before school or return to campus after going home. The project will also include modernized locker rooms, additional showers on the deck for quick rinse-offs, stairs and new public restrooms to bring the 25-year-old facility up to current code requirements.
The board will wait until a more finalized project budget to decide whether to add significant additional deck space, a feature students strongly advocated for during community meetings.
“What we heard from the students, which we thought was really unique, is they all advocated that they needed more deck space,” said Virginia Marquardt from HMC Architects, the firm serving as the district’s master architects. “There is never enough deck space that’s there, especially when there’s multiple teams, multiple schools, having a swim team or club.”
One of the other major decision points was extensive work needed at Robinson Elementary. Parents from the Robinson community have been strongly advocating for a major campus overhaul. The board approved major upgrades but the scale of the improvements had to be reduced. In what Graves described as one of the meeting’s most challenging decisions, the board approved funding for a new classroom building at Robinson Elementary but deferred construction of a new multipurpose room [MPR] to a future bond measure.
The $13.4 million classroom project will create a new building housing two transitional kindergarten classroom suites with proper bathrooms, one general education classroom, a library, administrative offices, and a teacher lounge. The decision addresses what emerged as Robinson’s most pressing need during community meetings.
“When we got to campus and explored it more with the parent population, some of the bigger concerns actually seemed to be the TK classrooms, where you had to walk through the kindergarten classroom to get to the bathroom,” Graves said. “You had to walk through the kindergarten class to get to the playground. So that was happening throughout the day.”
Board President Wysh Weinstein suggested that parents considering whether or not to keep their kids in MBUSD schools need their kids to have a better experience at early grade levels than the current kindergarten classrooms offer.
“TK and kinder are where you fall in love with your elementary school,” she said. “You want those experiences to be amazing. When parents are touring schools, if they’re looking at facilities where the TK classrooms don’t even have bathrooms — that’s a huge turn off, and that might turn people away.”
“That feels like more of a need, and the MPR more of a ‘nice to have,’” Weinstein said. “It’s a daily impact versus quarterly, or whatever.”
Deputy superintendent Dawnalyn Murakawa-Leopard said that the new building also addresses administrative challenges the current layout at Robinson creates.
“Of all of the elementary schools, the entry to Robinson is the most challenging,” she said. “If you’re a member of the public and you come in, you’re in the campus before you even blink. There’s no stopping point, there’s no lobby area. So it is really a challenge for the staff to manage the flow of people in and out of that campus, not to mention the lack of a conference room. The principal’s office doubles as everything, and when you walk into that office, two people really can hardly get by.”
Robinson parents had advocated for both the classroom building and a new multipurpose room, noting their cafeteria is the smallest in the district. Most schools can fit about half their enrollment into their multipurpose rooms, Marquardt noted, but Robinson cannot. The board acknowledged the need but prioritized instructional spaces.
“Every school site wants a new MPR, but the reality is only Grandview has one,” Weinstein said, referring to the multipurpose rooms that serve as cafeterias and assembly spaces. “And that was because it fit in with their classrooms.”
The new building will allow the district to remove portable classrooms currently in the parking lot, potentially creating additional parking after re-striping. When the board asked Robinson parents directly which building mattered more if they could only choose one, Weinstein said, “the feeling and the conversation was more around kinder and TK, actual classroom.”
The board approved a revised $19.4 million modernization plan for Manhattan Beach Middle School, down from an initial $27 million estimate. The reduction came after Murakawa-Leopard and Director of Maintenance and Operations Paul Ruta conducted detailed campus assessments in the week before the meeting.
“I think what we need to do at MBMS is give them our full love and support,” Graves said. “But I think we should do at MBMS what we’ve done at all of our other schools.”
The adjusted plan will replace carpeting throughout general classrooms and science rooms with the same luxury vinyl tile installed at elementary schools during previous bond work. The project will repair casework where needed rather than replacing everything, modernize restrooms, and update the entire campus’s safety and security infrastructure including fire alarms, intrusion systems, bells, clocks, and public address systems.
The main cost-saving measure is not replacing ceiling tiles and lighting, a decision that saved $8.29 million. Career Technical Education classrooms, including film and art spaces, will not be included in this phase because they’ve been updated more recently.
Murakawa-Leopard emphasized that the approach mirrors the previously successful elementary school modernizations.
“At the elementary schools, we didn’t do a full replacement,” she said. “We went and found what we needed to do in each room. So this is similar to what we did there.”
Board members expressed confidence in the streamlined approach.
“The only thing that’s really being removed is the ceiling and lighting, which I think is a minor in terms of ability to learn,” Weinstein said.
The 27-year-old middle school is also significantly newer than many district buildings that date to the 1950s.
The board approved several Mira Costa High School projects. The English classroom building will be modernized rather than replaced, a decision that compresses the project timeline from 15 months to a single summer while still updating finishes, electrical and mechanical systems, and technology. The existing casework will receive cosmetic updates and repairs rather than full replacement.
The library will be completely rebuilt to reflect modern educational needs. “The school library that we went to is not the library of today that students need,” Marquardt said. The new design includes both quiet reading spaces and “little rooms that are easily supervised, for kids to go in and maybe work on projects together or do some individual work.”
A dedicated collaboration space will allow teachers to bring entire classes to the library or conduct professional development without closing the facility to other users, a chronic problem with the current layout.
“Right now, if [the librarian] has something, she has to close the library, or if a teacher has to use it, she has to close the library,” Marquardt said.
The cafeteria project evolved from a proposed renovation into complete demolition and reconstruction. The 1950s-era building couldn’t efficiently accommodate both high school food service and function as the central kitchen for all five elementary schools, a role currently filled by an undersized kitchen at the middle school. The renovation would have cost only about $2 million less than new construction, but the risk of discovering hidden structural issues during construction made the savings illusory.
“There was so much uncertainty,” Marquardt said of the old structure. “When you go into construction and you start opening walls, there’s things that you’re going to find that you never thought were going to be there.”
The new building will also address student concerns about cafeteria line cutting and congestion by creating separate serving areas on the north and south sides.
Murakawa-Leopard noted the current central kitchen arrangement at the middle school requires an elaborate coordination effort. Food service staff from all campuses must share the cramped kitchen space simultaneously, which directors described as a “ballet dance” to avoid collisions while preparing meals for multiple schools.
The board approved plans to modernize two “annex” buildings at Pacific Elementary School that were bypassed during previous bond work. The project will create proper transitional kindergarten classroom suites with integrated bathrooms and storage, add staff restrooms currently lacking in that area, and upgrade playground equipment appropriate for two-to-five-year-olds.
“TK requires, similar to kindergarten, a 1,350 square foot classroom building that also includes their own toilet rooms and storage,” Marquardt said. The upper building’s four classrooms will be reconfigured into two TK classrooms and one general education classroom.
The modernization will also allow removal of portable classrooms currently in the parking lot, with the district planning to re-stripe the area for additional parking spaces.
The approved scope of work totals approximately $207 million, utilizing the $200 million bond plus an additional $5 million in developer fees earmarked for the Meadows Elementary portable replacement project and roughly $2 million remaining in state bond funds.
The path to that figure required difficult choices. At the meeting’s outset, Murakawa-Leopard presented a slide showing $227 million in potential projects — $27 million over budget.
“$227 million is where we would be if we tried to do everything, which clearly is beyond the ability of our bond,” Murakawa-Leopard said.
Getting to $207 million meant eliminating the Robinson multipurpose room ($11 million), reducing the middle school modernization scope ($8.29 million), and deferring demolition of a building at the preschool ($1.5 million).
Murakawa-Leopard emphasized the importance of the board’s final decisions.
“Once we go down the really detailed design process, pulling back and changing our mind loses us time, which makes things cost more money,” she said. “It is really critical that we make the decision that we feel is the best decision now [so] that we’ll be able to take it through to the end.”
Graves acknowledged the broader context of unmet needs.
“We recognize that that master plan would require a bond of $480 million,” she said. “So we’re not even looking at half the work that we would like to get accomplished.”
Notably absent from any current bond funding: multipurpose room and office modernizations at four elementary schools (all except Grandview), which remain priorities for a future bond measure.
“All schools, except for Grandview, we still have work to do in really making sure that the non-classroom spaces, the MPRs and the offices and in some cases, the libraries are really brought up to date and made functional,” Murakawa-Leopard said.
District-wide infrastructure projects — including safety and security upgrades, mechanical system replacements for units likely to fail within five years, and roofing work — are already in the design phase. Plans are scheduled for submission to the Division of the State Architect before the holidays, with construction targeted for summer 2026 at nearly every school site.
Weinstein thanked the architects and district staff for months of detailed planning work.
“This did not come together overnight, and this is months and months of work,” she said, singling out Ruda for particular praise. “Every time we don’t know something, everyone asks Paul.”
The board will begin scoping and programming for Manhattan Beach Preschool and Meadows Elementary projects in January, with detailed design work on the Mira Costa and Pacific Elementary projects also beginning early next year.
After voting unanimously to approve the program scope, Weinstein captured the board’s hopeful mood: “I hope everybody feels like they’re getting a little something,” she said, “and that nobody feels like they lost a lot.” ER
