City gives MBUSD $1 million to improve campus safety
The Manhattan Beach City Council on Tuesday night unanimously moved to allocate $1 million to help bolster school safety in local campuses in the wake of last month’s Parkland shooting.
Councilperson Steve Napolitano, who made the motion, said that school safety discussions grew out of an ad hoc committee with members of both the council and the Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Education. The committee is tasked with discussing joint use agreements of sports fields.
“In doing so, we talked about how we can actually make our schools safer, with the idea that it’s not a school issue, it’s a community issue,” Napolitano said, noting that on any given day 20 percent of the city’s population is in a school.
Assessments are underway for measures to improve campus safety. In the meantime, Manhattan Beach Police Department patrols are giving special attention to campuses. Councilperson Richard Montgomery said those patrols are “very actively” present, particularly at student drop-off and pickup times.
“There is a sense of comfort knowing our people are watching our schools,” Montgomery said.
The city had an unexpected bounty in its unreserved fund balance, which staff two weeks ago told council was at $3.5 million. Such funds have not been otherwise designated by the council and are thus available for one-time purposes, such as capital improvements.
But even school district officials didn’t see such a significant amount of financial assistance coming so quickly from the city.
“We are thrilled that the council took the initiative to do this,” said MBUSD Superintendent Mike Matthews. “They are clearly interested in the safety of the community and the safety of our students and employees, and we are all grateful.”
“This just reinforces the partnership that we have in this community between the City Council and the School Board,” said Karen Komatinsky, MBUSD board president. “It’s a reinforcing factor that we work together well. And this is all about the village — everyone in this community has some degree of responsibility to help raise this village.”
Komatinsky said she’d “heard rumblings” the council was interested in allocating money to school safety but was nonetheless surprised.
“I am humbled,” she said. “Because I think in today’s environment, with school safety being such a hot topic across the country — this is just really a great move, and it will really help.”
The school board at its last meeting, on March 14, revisited safety plans for every district campus. Among the changes was a tighter restriction on entry and exit to elementary school campuses; the goal is now for all gates into and out of the schools to be locked 95 percent of the time between 8:30 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. The board also received an overall safety update from staff, which reviewed the four kinds of safety drills students practice repeatedly throughout the year — fire drills, earthquake drills, active shooter/lockdown drills, and shelter-in-place drills (used when there is a danger in the vicinity of the campus, or on campus).
“We have been enhancing safety protocols, everything from locking mechanisms to class doors to entry and exit points on campus to the process of how you get on campus,” Komatinsky said. “There is always room for improvement; it’s never going to be perfect, but over the years we have enhanced a lot of these procedures. The thing is you have to have all of these things in place — you can’t have just one. It all works together.”
Matthews and MBPD Chief Derrick Abell — who also is an assistant freshman football coach at Mira Costa High School — issued a joint “Nixle” public safety alert last week outlining the steps MBUSD and MBPD are taking together to improve campus safety, including assessments and police training of school staff in active shooter as regards active shooter drills.
Matthews said that some of the immediately identifiable needs the new funds can be used for include installing fencing at every school save Manhattan Beach Middle School, which already is fenced, as well as the installation of classroom door barricade devices Chief Abell has suggested. As the Nixle alert noted, none of the campuses were designed when controlling entry and exit was such a critical priority.
“We have some immediate plans for fencing that can be addressed right now with these funds,” Matthews said. “And we are doing campus walks with the police department and school principals that will shine a light on other immediate needs. It’s time to reassess. As Chief Abell says, it’s a new paradigm now. We have to take a closer look than before.”