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# Time to play school district’s shell game
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/time-to-play-school-districts-shell-game/
- Published: 2007-02-26T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T23:23:39.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Malibu, #archive-import

WE’RE BEING FLEECED LIKE the local rubes at a two-bit carnival. I haven’t seen a shell game like this since my days as a school kid in Pennsylvania. But, instead of marbles and quarters, we’re talking millions of bucks and our childrens’ education.

Financial hokey-pokey at the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has been going on for years. The latest crisis started in October when the SMMUSD Board reached a tentative agreement for a 5 percent pay raise with the Santa Monica- Malibu Classroom Teachers Association that would cost the district $7.3 million over three years.

Last October, newly hired school Superintendent Dianne Talarico signed the required AB 1200 public disclosure form certifying the district could meet the costs of the agreement. However, the district’s chief business officer, Winston Braham, refused to certify the document, thus sending up red flags about the district’s fiscal stability.

A month later, Braham abruptly resigned. Talarico announced she was seeking an interim CBO and that the state-sanctioned school consulting firm — Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team — had been retained to review the district’s finances. FCMAT would prepare a multi-year financial projection of the district’s general fund with an eye to achieving and sustaining a balanced budget.

Last month, the word leaked out that Braham’s contract settlement cost the district close to $190,000 and prohibits him from discussing SMMUSD finances. School supporters and some City Council members are angry, charging that silencing Braham is protecting the “district culture” and isn’t in the public interest. The city of Santa Monica provides in excess of $6 million annually in city funds to the SMMUSD under a 2004 agreement.

Two weeks ago, the FCMAT report was issued. It concluded the district could afford the 5 percent pay raise, after all, but only after certain financial conditions were met. FCMAT projected an overall cumulative deficit for the current and following two years to be close to $9 million. They noted the recent pay increase granted to teachers has “greatly accentuated the problem” and that the school board acted irresponsibly in tentatively approving the classroom teachers agreement without any strategy for covering its additional cost.

FCMAT also advised “using district resources more productively and efficiently” and remedy its pattern of deficit spending. Contributing substantially to the SMMUSD’s ongoing financial crisis is the board’s inability to understand how the use of “one time only reserve funds” for approving annual recurring salary and benefit increases contributes to ongoing debt.

FCMAT also discovered in 2005, $3 million was transferred from a restricted redevelopment fund to the general fund so that restricted monies could be counted as part of the required three percent reserve. It’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Because of shrinking enrollment, FCMAT recommended upping inter-district student transfers to bring in more state income. However, permit students do not pay school taxes or fees, so local parcel taxpayers are forced to make up any shortcomings in state allocations. And, there are some who say importing 1,700 children (about 20 percent of the district’s students) is causing classroom overcrowding.

Interestingly, it seems that nobody is even thinking about how approximately 160-plus units of public housing coming on-line could increase enrollment by hundreds of new students just in the next year?

None of this is new. I wrote (SMDP, Nov. 27, 2006, page 4) that in 2001, the school board was advised that “fundamental reforms of serious systemic problems” were needed. Six years later, apparently neither SMMUSD bureaucrats or board members still haven’t figured it out. Maybe they don’t care.

They should. The district must be fiscally prudent if they expect to get millions of dollars in city funding. And, with two parcel taxes due for renewal in the next couple of years and another $200 million school improvement/construction bond pending, they’ll have to impress us voters that their fiduciary ducks are truly in a row.

Meanwhile, despite board pronouncements that “Everything is OK” (SMDP, Feb. 21, Page 4), more and more money falls into a black hole. The incompetence and arrogance of the flaky Board of Education makes losers of us all — including our kids — big time!

In most communities, this kind of irresponsible stewardship would cause heads to roll, but here, we keep reelecting these wizards. Maybe, it’s the voters who need an economics lesson unless they enjoy paying more for less.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 26, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/022607.pdf?ref=smdp.com)