Fourteen Santa Monica Malibu School District employees were fired during the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Education Committee meeting on Thursday, November 18.
On Friday, spokeswoman Gail Pinsker confirmed that nearly all of the layoffs were due to employee non-compliance with vaccine mandates, which went into effect October 1 for Santa Monica school district employees.
“I can confirm that there have been 13 layoffs for refusal to be vaccinated, which is now a term of employment,” Pinsker wrote in an email.
According to information released during the meeting, the 13 were charged with violating the state education law, which allows a school district to fire employees for cause.
One of the abortions was a Malibu High School groundskeeper, who was fired because of the mandatory vaccination requirement.
One teacher was also fired, but there was no word as to what caused it.
A representative of the Santa Monica Malibu Classroom Teachers’ Association, which “represents the staff groups: Child Development Teachers, Early Childhood Teachers, K-12 Teachers, Speech / Language Pathologists, Counselors, Librarians, Adult Education Teachers, Substitute Teachers, Nurses and others not -Administrative Positions in the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District, “wrote the layoffs were” classified employees “- not teachers.
“The reality is that we haven’t lost that many members because of the vaccination mandate,” wrote Claudia Bautista-Nicholas, president of the SMMCTA, in an email on Wednesday. “I think the total could be four out of more than 500 teachers. I know any person who leaves a site looks like a blow, but teachers are big advocates of vaccines. As a union, we support vaccines for all of that. ”Are entitled to masks in school and tests. This has kept most of our students healthy and personally learned, and that is what we all want in the end. “
No step was taken at Thursday’s meeting to call for vaccines for children – an issue that is under ongoing discussion in the district.
SMMUSD Superintendent Dr. Ben Drati again urged parents of children over the age of five to have their children vaccinated.
The school district hired nurses in Malibu on Wednesday, December 1, to deliver COVID-19 vaccines. The follow-up injections will be given in Malibu on Wednesday December 22nd and Thursday January 6th.
December 22nd is after the start of the Christmas holidays, so the second clinic on January 6th is for families out of town.
The school district will offer the recordings to everyone in the community, whether or not they have children in the schools.
Public schools here still require their children to wear masks in accordance with national masking requirements, regardless of whether they are vaccinated or not. The district will shortly be sending out a survey on safety protocols to middle and high school parents.
District litigation can be a barrier to independence
A Malibu attorney with a penchant for shaking up local politics may have done it again.
Kevin Shenkman wants to split the SMMUSD into seven constituencies.
Shenkman takes advantage of a new state law that allows the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) to divide a school district into constituencies.
The petition requires 500 signatures from voters in Santa Monica and Malibu.
One of the main arguments made by advocates for the independent school district in Malibu is that Santa Monica voters outnumber Malibu, making it nearly impossible for Malibu residents to win the election to the board, but a guaranteed seat could undermine that argument.
The story was published by the Santa Monica Lookout newspaper.
Schenkman told the Lookout that five of the seven current school board members live in Santa Monica’s most affluent neighborhood.
Splitting Santa Monica into six boroughs and leaving Malibu presumably in the seventh borough would give the minority neighborhoods in southern Santa Monica a voice.
Schenkman has made a name for himself, suing councilors across California, and winning lucrative payouts to avoid voting lawsuits.
He has successfully forced many small towns to introduce district elections to increase the representation of minority voters.
His district election process against the Santa Monica City Council is currently on appeal; If Shenkman wins there, this potentially landmark decision could result in the city of Malibu also being divided into five wards, with residents only being able to elect one councilor to represent their neighborhood.
In 2020, attorney Milton Grimes threatened the city of Malibu with litigation under the California Voting Rights Act of 2001 that would force the city to hold district elections. Grimes and Shenkman have worked on similar cases across California.
Schenkman told the Lookout that splitting SMMUSD into seven constituencies could be done within a year, as opposed to the decades it takes compared to the multi-year process it would take to separate Malibu from the Santa Monica district.
A version of this story was first broadcast on KBUU News. This web version replaces a previous short message.
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