School District Reports Mostly Good News

With ongoing state budget cuts to education, public schools in Manhattan Beach continue to do more with less, said Dr. Mike Matthews, superintendent of the Manhattan Beach Unified School District, at Wednesday night's school board meeting.

“It’s one of the great dilemmas of public education, that we’re being cut [monetarily] every year but our [student testing] scores, statewide, continue to go up,” he said. “We’re doing more with less than ever before and we’re not being rewarded for it.”

During its first school board meeting of the New Year, the board heard a summary of accomplishments for the first half of the school year, a school-by-school evaluation report card and the "good and the ugly" of California's current state budget.

Due to state budget cuts, the district anticipates that its $40,000 school transportation fund will be cut, deputy superintendent Rick Bagley told the board.

Said Matthews, “The economy is slowly recovering and we believe that it will get better, but no time soon. But we’re in this for the long haul and our employees have been doing great with making due in difficult times.”

Mira Costa High's rise in API scores was highlighted by Matthews, who said every school within the district has also achieved an API score of at least 900. The API scores were first reported to the board in Sept. 2011.

“It is not easy for a high school to have an API over 900,” Matthews said. “They [students] are tested on things that the other schools aren’t, so we should be really proud of Mira Costa.”

Higher scores bring higher expectations Matthews noted. 

“One of the issues of high performing is sometimes it’s hard to improve by much. You can’t make some of the massive improvements seen at some other places. Also, just a few students that perform poorly can bring you down, so it is a challenge to keep moving up.

“I feel very fortunate that the last four years we’ve moved up every single year and we hope we can continue to do that, but there’s just no guarantee,” he said.

Also Wednesday evening, Carolyn Seaton, executive director of educational services, presented the MBUSD School Accountability Report Card, an annual evaluation required by State law that includes information on school safety, demographic data, academic data, and class sizes, amongst other information. A school district's SARC must be approved and published by Feb. 1.