Board OK for Malibu High Likely : Education: Creation of the new school would come over objections from some Santa Monica parents. They term the plan elitist.

Unswayed by a crescendo of criticism from Santa Monica residents, the Santa Monica-Malibu school board is expected to recommend Monday night that a separate high school be established in Malibu.

Several board members predicted a unanimous vote for the school, which would open in 1992 on the under-utilized campus of Malibu Park Middle School near Zuma Beach. It would start with about 90 freshman the first year, and upper grades would be added a year at a time.

Late last week, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Supt. Eugene Tucker issued a revised set of recommendations for the school aimed at addressing some of the criticisms raised by opponents of the school.

Santa Monica residents say the school is ill-conceived and would drain resources and the best students from Santa Monica High. Latino community leaders say the district should first tackle bilingual education, the above-average dropout rate of minority students and other pressing problems at Santa Monica High, the district’s only high school.

The most important revision in the plan recommended by Tucker would be that Malibu High “not be designed as a college prep magnet” school. He also proposed that enrollment be limited to 480 students for grades nine through 12, instead of 600, and that the school be graded each year on its enrollment, courses, extracurricular activities, staffing, community relations, pupil attitudes toward the school and finances.

Malibu High would be open to students throughout the district, but because of its small size, it would not have the array of classes or extracurricular activities of Santa Monica High, which has an enrollment of 2,649.

The Malibu Park campus, which presently has about 300 students, can accommodate about 1,000. The district projects costs for the school at $30,000 for the first year and $92,800 annually once it is in full operation.

The plan for the new school surfaced in 1989, prompted by Malibu parents’ concerns that Santa Monica High is a one-hour bus ride from their homes and that Malibu children were leaving the district for private schools. A study committee appointed by the board concluded last year that the solution was to establish an alternative college preparatory high school at Malibu Park.

Opponents of Malibu High blasted Tucker’s late revisions as meaningless. “I almost look at it as an admission that the district staff didn’t do its homework,” said Santa Monica parent Richard Maullin. “Now it’s offering this series of placating statements to fend off legitimate criticism that they spoke before they calculated.” The changes, he said, merely “justify the predetermined decision to have the school out there, come hell or high water.”

Maullin vowed that opponents would continue fighting the proposal.

Tucker said the decision to drop the college-prep magnet designation means that it will not be an elitist academy. However, as all high schools in the state must, it would offer courses meeting University of California admission requirements. Because of its size, it may not be able to offer much else.

This has been understood from the start by Malibu parents and private school parents, said Jeffrey Jennings, chairman of the Malibu study committee. “This has all been explained in the past. . . . Malibu knows exactly what the program is,” he said.

“The choice of ‘college prep,’ as the definitional term or descriptive term, was unfortunate because it was given all kinds of negative connotations down in Santa Monica that we never intended,” Jennings said.

But critics say it will still be an exclusive school tailored to the wishes of wealthy Malibu residents.

“If you only offer college prep classes, and not vocational classes or sheltered English classes (for limited English-speaking pupils) or special education, the only students you have left are those planning to go to college,” said former school board member Della Barrett. “You’re sending down (to Santa Monica) all those who don’t want to go to college, who want vocational classes.”

A final mission statement for the school should be drafted later, Tucker says. So Monday, what the board will be voting on is “a small general purpose school with a limited curriculum,” said board member Connie Jenkins, who supports the proposal.

The original plan for a minority recruiter to help ensure racial balance at Malibu drew sharp criticism from Santa Monica Latinos. “It’s a safety issue for Malibu residents to send their kids to Santa Monica,” said Arturo Olivas, Latino Resource Organization executive director, “but on the other hand, (the district thinks) we can bus in Latinos for racial equality.”

The recruiter idea has been scrapped. Instead, the district’s coordinator of bilingual minority programs will provide general counseling to minority parents and students.

“If there were minority students for whom the Malibu campus would be the best educational opportunity, then (the coordinator) would let the parents . . . know about it. But that would not be the primary focus of the job,” said Patricia Hoffman, school board president.