The second leg of public hearings held by the Los Angeles County Office of Education Committee on School District Organization will shift the playing field from Malibu to Santa Monica.
On Saturday beginning at 9:30 a.m. at the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) District office, the committee will continue to receive input on the legality of the voting map submitted as part of the Trustee Area Voting Petition, which looks to establish district-based voting in SMMUSD. The first of these meetings took place Jan. 31 on the Malibu campus of Santa Monica College.
The petition was initially submitted in 2022 by Malibu attorney Kevin Shenkman on behalf of residents, claiming that SMMUSD’s at-large voting system is unfair to minority voters and proposing a division of the district into seven geographic "trustee areas." The legal action is separate from a petition to split SMMUSD and form a Malibu Unified School District, however, county officials and proponents of splitting the district noted that establishing district-based voting would be moot if Malibu were to undergo unification (the legal term for splitting into its own district). At the Jan. 31 hearing, SMMUSD Board of Education Vice-President Jon Kean spoke on unification, calling it the "elephant in the room" and saying that potential unification solutions will need to be pushed back "for at least one legislative year" due to the petition hearings.
Though Shenkman’s presentation in the hearing offered alternative maps, the initial map proposed in the petition would make non-contiguous districts merging parts of Malibu and Santa Monica. One district would fuse the eastern half of Malibu with Santa Monica’s Sunset Park neighborhood, while the other combines the western half of Malibu with Santa Monica’s NOMA and Wilmont neighborhoods.
The petitioners stated during the first hearing that the non-contiguous districts are necessary to give Malibu more representation in SMMUSD matters, something backed up by a bevy of Malibu-based public commenters. Shenkman and Demographer David Ely argued that it would not be "advisable" to draw a legal map with six Santa Monica trustee areas and one encompassing the whole of Malibu, because representation would not be properly split between the cities.
Attorney representing SMMUSD Frederic D. Woocher pushed back on that notion, saying a hypothetical split of trustee areas that gives one to Malibu still satisfies population requirements. The Jan. 31 hearing also included remarks from SMMUSD Board of Education member Maria Leon-Vasquez, who disagreed with the at-large voting system targeting minority voters. She added that she found it "insulting" that Malibu residents were being equated with being a member of a protected class under the California Voting Rights Act.
While the majority of Jan. 31 public comment was in favor of more Malibu representation, several opposed the map and agreed with SMMUSD’s reasoning, with the shift in Saturday’s meeting to Santa Monica potentially changing the makeup of commenters.
