School Officials Go Berzany

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

January 30 -- What should our school facilities look like 20 years from now? That’s the question District officials wanted answered in a “berzany” and “synergistic” way during a “convening” of some of the community’s best and brightest imaginations Saturday.

Santa Monica and Malibu represent “a slice of the American dream…a utopia” in many people’s eyes, School Superintendent John Deasy told the crowd of nearly 200 who’d gathered at the Sheraton Delfina penthouse.

And this was the community’s chance to make the schools there even better -- “to go from good to great,” Deasy added.

The presentations and workshops -- led by representatives from Concordia, LLC, Harley Ellis Devereaux and Sidewalk Studio -- seemed to fall right in sync with a timeline sketched out at a district Financial Oversight Committee (FOC) meeting on July 19 (see article).

That’s when district officials first broached the possibility of putting a facilities bond on November’s ballot.

But the word “bond” was never mentioned Saturday.

Instead, the hired consultants invited participants to “look holistically” at the “classroom of the future” and help the designers, architects and marketing firms “build the best plan for your community that we possibly can.”

New words were coined to get the public’s creative juices flowing.

The meeting itself was called a “convening.”

Participants were urged to think “big, bold and berzany.”

Although “berzany” was never defined, the consultants used it often. The word seemed to imply some state of imaginative freedom outside the bonds of workaday sanity.

“Think outside the box,” a predictable mantra, echoed nonstop across two conference rooms from four round-robin workshops.

After listening to an arcane lecture on “addressing all the leadership assets in a synergistic way” accompanied by rainbow-hued mandalas that seemed to illustrate alternatives to traditional hierarchical leadership patterns, one participant rather plaintively asked, “When do we start thinking outside the box?”

“Right now!” a bright-eyed facilitator wearing a minimalist charcoal gray business suit answered.

“Oh boy,” a man in the back row responded.

“What is the big vision?” another participant asked.

“We don’t have a clue. That’s up to you,” the facilitator told the group.

The dialogue seemed in danger of stalling out, when a group of student leaders and aspiring journalists from Santa Monica High School (SAMOHI) came to the rescue.

The students’ observations were grounded in the concrete, and their pointed questions kept bringing the dialogue back from the brink of ethereal abstraction.

Referring to the chain link fences around their high school and ID checks at the gates, senior class representative Jesus Contreras said, “Once you’re in you’re forced to stay in. I know people who don’t want to be there.”

He said he’d rather have “a school that says ‘come in.’”

This inspired a flurry of observations from the whole group.

Classrooms with no windows and the unappetizing odor in the school cafeteria were some of the issues raised before the facilitator turned the group’s discussion back to general goals.

Later meetings will get into specifics, she said.

Several consultants shared their ideas for schools as community centers, offsite campuses at museums and businesses and projects that cast the students in roles as entrepreneurs and the community as their clients.

Auxiliary campuses seemed a favorite idea among the experts.

But student newspaper editor Chelsea Rinnig raised a philosophical objection.

She pointed out that dividing the high school into smaller schools would reduce diversity, a value espoused by both adults and students.

After five hours, the participants got tired.

“This is like teaching calculus during seventh period,” school board Vice President Kathy Wisnicki joked as she closed the meeting.

Still, she was happy with the meeting and optimistic for the future.

“We’ve been able to achieve what we have achieved because of our community members,” she told the 50 or so who’d stayed to the end.

The next step is for the participants to “recruit” new members and to commit to come to all four of the next monthly meetings, which will culminate in a presentation of the plan to the School Board this summer.

Public input to the Facilities Master Plan must be complete by July if the district wants to put a bond on the fall ballot. Paperwork has to be submitted to the County Registrar of Voters 88 days before the election, school officials told the FOC last summer.

The next meeting will be held at Santa Monica High School from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 25.

To sign up, and to learn more about the planning process, see the Facilities Master Plan website.