District, Mira Costa employees deny both yearly calendar and bell schedule changes

By Danny Kelleher
Executive News Editor

The Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Trustees voted on Nov. 2 in favor of retaining the current calendar cycle through the 2014 school year.

Prior to the board’s passing of the plan, MBUSD teachers and classified employees voted at their respective schools on the prospect of altering the district’s yearly schedule to start and end school a week earlier. Both the classified employees and the teachers voted to keep the current calendar, and the results of these ballots came as recommendations to the MBUSD board on Nov. 2.

“I think what we want to do is bring people on to account for what’s best for kids,” Superintendent Dr. Michael Matthews said. “We’re okay with this result.”

Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board voted on Oct. 26 to adopt a calendar for the 2012-13 school year that will push the district’s start date back three weeks to Aug. 14.

“You sit down with people and talk it out,” Matthews said. “That’s what you do. We sat down this time, talked it out, [and] had two choices. There was a vote for one of those choices. We approved that, but let’s see what’s happening two years from now.”

The vote on the yearly calendar was one of two schedule-related action items that were held from Oct. 24-28 within the district. The other was on the implementation of a new Costa bell schedule.
The proposed plan would have featured Monday late starts from October through April and each school day would have been five minutes longer, along with other changes. The matter was voted on in June 2011, but various inconsistencies, such as the inclusion of classified employees, the inaccurate registering of voters and the absence of an overseer throughout the entire voting, caused the Manhattan Beach Unified Teachers Association to hold another vote on the matter.

“Having late start Mondays would have been beneficial for the high school community,” sophomore Sarah Locke-Henderson said. “Sleeping in helps start the week off.”
Though the majority of teachers were against implementing both potential schedule changes, some believe that the results of the votes show more about voter mentalities than the specifics of the ballots.

“All change is difficult at a high school,” Costa economics teacher Wayne Knutson said. “Whatever you’re already doing is easier than whatever else you could be doing instead.”