SMMUSD Fires 13 Employees For Vaccine Refusal – Independent Malibu School District May Just Have Been Torpedoed
Written by 991KBU on November 19, 2021
REPORT UPDATED AT 4:40PM FRIDAY WITH SMMUSD CONFIRMATION: 13 EMPLOYEES WERE FIRED FOR COVID 19 VACCINATION FAILURE.
14 employees of the Santa Monica Malibu school district were fired last night.
An unprecedented action.
No reasons were given last night … no reasons can be given publicly under privacy laws.
But today .. a district spokeswoman confirmed the employees were fired for failing to meet a condition of employment: having a valid vaccination history for Covid 19.
The firings came as the district is implementing mandatory Covid 19 vaccinations for all employees.
13 classified employees .,.. support staff … were fired.
They were charged with violating the state Education Code …. which allows a school district to fire staff for cause.
Privacy laws prohibit the school board from discussing in public … just what exactly that cause is.
Malibu High has apparently lost a groundskeeper … over the mandatory vaccination requirement.
One teacher was also let go … no word on what caused that.
No move was made last night to require vaccines for kids.
School superintendent Ben Drati again urged parents of kids aged 5 and up to get their kids vaccinated.
The school district has hired nurses to administer the anti-Covid vaccines on December First in Malibu.
The follow-up shots will be administered in Malibu on both December 22nd and January Sixth.
December 22nd is after Christmas break starts … so the second clinic on the Sixth of January is designed for those people who are out of town.
The school district will offer the shots to anyone in the community … no matter if they have kids in the schools or not.
Public schools here are still requiring their kids to wear masks …. whether they are vaccinated or not.
The district will soon be sending out a survey on safety protocols…. to middle school and high school parents.
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A Malibu lawyer with a history of throwing a wrench into local politics may have done it again.
Kevin Shenkman wants to split the Santa Monica Malibu school district into seven voting districts.
That could derail efforts by Malibu to convince Los Angeles county bureaucrats to carve out a separate Malibu school district.
Shenkman is taking advantage of a new state law that allows LACOE … the Los Angeles county office of education … to carve a school district up into voting districts.
The petition needs 500 signatures from voters in santa monica and Malibu.
It is very possible that LACOE would use district voting as a way to throw a bone to Malibu voters … instead of giving Malibu a separate school district.
One of the major arguments made by Malibu independent school district advocates is that santa monica voters outweigh Malibu and make it nearly impossible for Malibu residence to win election to the board.
The story was broken by the santa monica Lookout newspaper.
Scheinkman told the santa monica paper that five of the seven current school board members live in the wealthiest neighborhood of santa monica.
Carving santa monica into six districts … and presumably leaving Malibu in the seventh district … would give a voice to minority neighborhoods in the south part of Santa Monica.
Scheinkman has made a name for himself suing city councils up and down California … and winning lucrative payoffs to avoid lawsuits over voting rights.
He has forced many small cities to adopt district voting… to increase representation by minority voters.
His district voting lawsuit against the Santa Monica city Council is currently on appeal …
If Shenkman wins there … that could force the City of Malibu to be cut into five districts… with voters in each district losing their ability to cast a ballot for city council members except for the one person in their district.
Scheinkman told the lookout newspaper that carving the Santa Monica Malibu school district into seven voting districts could happen within a year … versus the decades that it is taken versus the multiyear process it would take to split Malibu out of the santa monica district.
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