The shocking budget disaster hitting one of L.A.'s ritziest school districts.

MANHATTAN BEACH EPITOMIZES THE American dream, SoCal style. Here, Aviator Nation isn’t so much a brand as a way of life, worn alike by volleyball moms and their kin. The city, where the median home price has skyrocketed to $3.3 million and the population is about 75% white, is a study in relaxed affluence. It’s less aggressively glam than neighborhoods up the coast like Brentwood and Bel-Air. Sure, Volvo SUVs reign, but most kids attend public school, transporting themselves there and back on e-bikes. Social status is less about country club membership and more about which club sports team your kid is on and whether they made Junior Guards. 

For many families, the community’s prized asset — perhaps even ahead of its wide, surf-perfect beach — is its public school system. The eight campuses have a private-school feel, with sparkling buildings, athletic facilities to rival a high-end college, and parent-paid-for-perks such as a “makerspace,” a music program that starts in kindergarten, and reading specialists, librarians and counselors galore. 

“All you ever hear about is how Manhattan Beach schools have all the funding, all the money. That’s sort of the perception,” said Alison Burmeister, whose daughter enrolled at Mira Costa High School, the district’s crown jewel, after Palisades High School burned last year. 

To make all this possible in a public school district, the Manhattan Beach Education Fund, a group of MBA-wielding parents, engages in seemingly round-the-clock fundraising. The foundation — its website could be confused for Bain & Company’s —  raises about $7 million each year for the district, more than $1 million of it from the Manhattan Beach Wine Auction held every June, otherwise known as the “Mom Prom.” 

“Manhattan Beach parents love to party,” noted one parent and Wine Auction regular. 

But beneath the glitz and the giant, cabernet-fueled checks flowing into school coffers, the district’s finances have grown more precarious with each passing year. This spring, school board meetings descended into shock and acrimony, particularly after 58 teachers and staff got preliminary layoff notices in February, including two recent Teacher of the Year winners. 

 “I thought I had found a unicorn in [the Manhattan Beach Unified School District], but no,” said one parent who moved to Manhattan Beach specifically for its schools and did not want to be named for fear of ruffling feathers in the small, tight-knit community. “Five-million-dollar-houses…but a completely broke district.”

The problem, according to parents and administrators: a change more than a decade ago in the way California allocates its state education money. The move was intended to help disadvantaged children but has inadvertently pummeled districts where families have more means. It’s not just Manhattan Beach: More than 200 small- and medium-sized school districts around the state are facing similar dire straits. 

For many well-to-do parents, it feels like the unspoken contract they believed they entered into when they bought homes in the district and kicked in thousands of dollars to the PTA and the education fund was suddenly shattered. Parents were starting to think they couldn’t fundraise their way out of this  — no matter how much money they gave or how many “Fun Runs” they held. 

So this spring, in addition to the usual heated fundraising efforts,  Manhattan Beach parents have taken on a new civic duty: lobbying officials in Sacramento to revamp how schools are funded. 

“We do understand the equity model,” said Nathalie Rosen, a parent and board member of the Manhattan Beach Education Fund. “And we do understand that we’re a very fortunate, privileged community and that we have the wherewithal to privately fundraise … But when we’re fundraising so hard and we can’t even pay to have enough math teachers and English teachers so that our kids won’t have 47 kids in a class? That’s where this funding formula feels broken.” 

ANYONE PAYING CLOSE ATTENTION to the district’s budgets should have been aware that the finances in MBUSD have been precarious for some time. For several years running, a handful of teachers have been warned that they might lose their jobs each spring, only to get a reprieve when officials and parents managed to scrape together enough money at the last minute. 

But this year, the hole in the budget ballooned to $6.7 million, a figure no amount of creative accounting wizardry and scrounging for budget dust could fix. In February, the district’s beloved 2025 Teacher of the Year, Maddie Hutchinson, was among those warned that she might be laid off. Then, in May, the 2023 Teacher of the Year Daniel Leonard was officially terminated.   

Parents freaked out. 

“Ms. Hutchinson is one of the reasons that my daughter is at Mira Costa still and is doing well,” said Burmeister. 

There was a similar outcry for Leonard, a sixth-grade science teacher at Manhattan Beach Middle School who looks more like a fresh-faced grad student than someone who has presided over adolescent Bunsen burner experiments for nearly a decade. Beloved by students, Leonard is a fixture outside of the classroom as well as in it, spotted surfing on weekends and watering the school garden after school. 

“He was one of the first teachers that I’ve had that has made me love science,” said Brooke Chang, a former student. 

There was more bad news: In addition to Leonard, 25 more teachers and staff were also given official termination notices. Class sizes would balloon. Enrichment programs and language courses, including Chinese, were also on the chopping block.   

“We are not trimming fat,” School Board Vice President Jen Dohner said at a board meeting. “We are trimming muscle. There’s no fat left.” 

The grim news was the talk of “The Point,” the lavish outdoor mall where parents grab coffee or burgers and beer on weekends while their kids roam. Those who were not keyed in had the same question: How could this be happening?

Manhattan Beach is one of the most desirable school districts in California. Its test scores are consistently among the highest in the state, and it attracts some of the best teaching talent, churning out state-recognized Teachers of the Year like Leonard on a regular basis. Mira Costa High School looks like a glimmering college campus. An $18 million Olympic-sized swimming pool is in the works to complement the school’s $39 million athletic center, opened in 2021. “Costa’s” rigorous academics, broad and varied  extracurriculars and championship-winning sports teams attract students from other districts who try to get in through permits. Never was this more true than after the L.A. fires, when Costa absorbed more than 120 students from the incinerated ruins of Palisades High School; many are still there. 

To save this educational refuge, parents transformed themselves into education policy experts, wading into the complex rules of school funding in California to understand what was happening and how they might change it.  

The central culprit, many Manhattan Beach parents came to believe, is the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, which was established in 2013 to try to help school districts that enroll large numbers of disadvantaged children.  

The “formula” boosts funding for schools that have higher  populations of English learners, foster youth, and kids who qualify for free or reduced lunch and foster youth 

The old funding formula, for all but the very richest communities with so much property tax revenue they didn’t need the state’s money, was largely based on a simple per-pupil payment to school districts from the state government — with extra money from federal anti-poverty programs and other federal sources layered on top. The new formula radically altered that metric. 

It still sent an initial “base” funding grant to each school district based on the number of students enrolled. But districts with more disadvantaged students now get additional grants that, over the years, have become increasingly generous. 

When it came to assisting disadvantaged students, the formula worked: According to a 2024 Brookings report, Lessons Learned from 10 Years of California’s Local Control Funding Formula, as money to poor schools increased, so did student outcomes in the form of improved test scores, graduation rates and college readiness. Grade repetition went down.

For richer school districts, however, the story was different, mostly because the “base” funding has not kept pace with spiraling costs of health insurance, teacher pensions, or special education services. The result is that school districts with larger populations of fewer disadvantaged students have slipped further and further behind. 

For a while, Manhattan Beach managed to get along despite reduced funding. Voters approved a parcel tax in 2018 and renewed it in 2024 to send an extra $2 million to schools. And the foundation, MBEF, fundraised and fundraised.  

And many parents were OK with that: Their children already had so much, it seemed only fair to send more money to districts that enrolled more disadvantaged children. 

“I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal,” said Liz Hallinan, an executive member of Grand View Elementary’s PTA. “As someone who is lucky and privileged in life, I’m happy that the extra money” — from state funding — “goes to communities who can’t afford it. For me, that lets me live my values.”

But as costs for things like pensions and health care have shot up, even with dogged rain-making by parents, the district hasn’t been able to keep up. By the 2025 school year, Manhattan Beach was getting $3,404 less per pupil each year than the state average, according to the district. 

There were signs, too, that the community’s appetite for taxing itself out of the problem was waning. In 2022, Manhattan Beach voters shot down a $1,095-per-property parcel tax that would have generated $11 to $13 million annually for the district. 

As layoff notices went out to teachers, and reports began to circulate of class sizes climbing close to 50 students per teacher, parents reacted with rage and despair — and once-sleepy school board meetings began to turn contentious.  

“A number of members of the community can afford to send their kids to other places and it will spiral out of control,” warned father Peter Boyd at a recent school board meeting. Boyd, an attorney who moved with his family to Manhattan Beach in 2019 from Washington, D.C., said he chose it over Santa Monica for its “amazing school system.” But he said that the teacher layoffs had his wife looking into private school, and while he was committed to public education, he predicted many other families might flee, further hollowing out the district’s finances. 

The stark contrast between Manhattan Beach’s airbrushed image and the reality of its school’s finances spurred local headlines and even Instagram reels—“Are families leaving MBUSD?!,” asked South Bay real estate influencer @justcarissa in a clip that was forwarded 1,169 times.

STILL, THE FUNDRAISING CONTINUED at a breakneck pace. 

On a recent Saturday afternoon, the electric synth of Swedish House Mafia’s EDM anthem Don’t You Worry Child reverberated through a members-only club in downtown Manhattan Beach. Women in sundresses and white Veja sneakers swayed to the music in small groups, wine glasses in one hand, the other pumping the air in time with the beat. Their spouses milled around the bar, surveying a selection of premium tequilas and bourbons. Overseeing it all was an MBUSD fourth grader clad in silver-glitter Chuck Taylors and a purple sequined jacket. Standing — or, rather, bopping — at her DJ station, she expertly manned the jog wheels of her mixer as it exploded in flashing, neon lights. 

The event was “Bottles and Beats,” a tequila-tasting fundraiser organized by parents in less than a week to try to help plug the yawning budget gap. It raised $10,000.

Then, around the same time, 700 people signed up for the annual 5K “Gator Run.”  That raised another $49,000.

Over at Meadows Elementary, Principal Michelle Krzmarzick turned her hobby of crocheting animals—for stress relief, she said—into a business. So far she’s raised $4,000 by selling capybaras, butterflies and “emotional support chicken nuggets” to students. 

“I know it’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s one way to show that you can make a difference, and it also makes a lot of people happy,” she said. 

By the end of the month, the foundation had raised $7.6 million — its highest total ever.  

The new funds allowed seven certificated teachers who had been pink slipped to get their jobs back — but 19 more staff were still on the chopping block. 

The frenzy of fundraising has taken some aback. 

 “There are all these different fundraising things: it’s not just, ‘Oh, give this,’” said Jessica Masterson, whose daughter transferred from Pali High to Mira Costa after the fires. “At Pali, it was, ‘here, give $2,500 and you’re done.’”

Other parents said, despite the community’s wealth, the requests for donations add up. 

 “We pay $40,000 in property taxes, I didn’t budget for any kind of money for the schools,” said one parent who didn’t want to be named because of sensitivities around money. “I give to the PTA. Or when there are fundraisers, I’ll give $50. But several thousand dollars a year for multiple kids is a lot of money.” 

The divide between those who enthusiastically write checks and don gowns at the wine auction and those who don’t creates tension among parents. The givers exude a “country club atmosphere,” complained one parent, giving off a ‘what’s wrong with you?’ vibe to the non-givers. 

Meanwhile, eyebrows go up over “people buying Chanel bags and they’re not listed on the donor list,” added another parent. 

MBEF’s primary “ask” of families is an annual donation of $2,500 per student. The amount is hardly insignificant, but the schools’ most ardent supporters see it as a quid pro quo with both financial and social implications. 

 “The way my family looks at it is, O.K., even with two kids in public school, we pay $5,000 a year for a top-quality education, and I don’t have to spend $40,000 to $60,000 to send them to private school,” said Hallinan, the member of the Grand View PTA.  “To me, that’s a no-brainer.”

And yet, this year, it was still maybe not enough.

MANHATTAN BEACH IS NOT ALONE in its frustration over the LCFF. David Roth, superintendent of the Buckeye Union School District in El Dorado Hills, east of Sacramento, recently launched a campaign to convince state leaders to do something about the way the LCFF is hurting schools that aren’t looked upon as needy. He calls it “Raise the Base.” 

“Every day we delay means another counselor cut, another library closed, another overcrowded classroom,” Roth wrote in a recent op-ed in Ed Source. “Adequate funding for every California student is not too much to ask.”

Since announcing his campaign, Roth said, he has been contacted by more than 200 districts and is on non-stop Zooms trying to arm districts with facts and figures to lobby legislators up in Sacramento. Other affluent districts feeling LCFF pain are Ross Valley in Marin County; and Piedmont City and Orinda Union, both outside of Oakland. 

On April 27, a group of 20 Manhattan Beach school board and foundation board members, teachers, parents, and students boarded a plane at 6:30 a.m. to head to Sacramento. The “Capitol Convoy,” as it was referred to, had lined up meetings with nearly two dozen state senators, assemblymen and aides to lay out their case.

In the weeks leading up to the trip, the group sent out 2,800 emails and postcards to the governor and state legislators, describing their budget situation and urging them to support more state funding for schools through various measures. Beyond raising the LCFF base fund they also wanted Gov. Gavin Newsom to release billions raised from Proposition 98 that could be used for schools but that officials have held back to cushion the state’s general fund.   

The emails, it seemed, had been read. “Everyone we met with said, ‘Oh, yes. We know you,’” said Hilary Mahan, MBEF’s executive director. 

As for the responses from politicians, they followed a trend. First there was, “‘It’s wonderful you’re here, this is what you need to be doing — we hear you,’” Mahan said. But, she said, many legislators also warned that there were “a lot of competing priorities, including a huge number of students who are lower-income and we have to try and support them as well.”

“It wasn’t like we hit a home run but it certainly was part of the process,” she said. 

ON MAY 14, WHEN Newsom’s revised state budget was announced, parents, teachers and administrators pounced on the press release, trying to decipher what it would mean for the future. The message was admittedly mixed. Not all the Prop 98 funds were being released. But significantly more money for special education programs was approved, as was a block of funds that districts could use as they saw fit. And the governor proposed increasing the LCFF base grant to adjust for cost of living. The Legislature still must vote to approve it, but a few hours after the budget was released, one parent was cautiously optimistic. “I feel like it’s good news?”   

Meanwhile, the very next morning, teachers who had been cut received their formal termination papers from their principals. After being handed their envelopes, they returned to their classrooms to teach, uncertain whether the end-end was just a few weeks away, or merely a maybe-end. 

In the last few weeks, district officials and parents have doubled down on efforts to drum up more money. There is talk of putting another parcel tax before voters, and the foundation announced a new campaign to support its endowment fund at its wine auction last weekend.  

One teacher who got a termination notice said she was hopeful that the increased funding proposed by the governor’s budget and the parents’ fundraising would ultimately spare her job. But, they added: “In your head, you’re thinking, ‘Is this going to be next year, too? It’s a question of, do I want to stay at a place where this might be an indefinite cycle?’” 

Rosen, the parent who serves on the foundation’s board, said she thought Manhattan Beach had made a good case that districts like hers need a funding increase. 

But she also acknowledged  that it sometimes felt like a tough  sell. “It’s hard to be, like, ‘Hey, we’re Manhattan Beach where the average property is valued at [$3.3] million. We need more money,’” she said.

Nicole LaPorte is the author of The Men Who Would Be King: Moguls, Movies and a Company Called DreamWorks, and Guilty Admissions: The Bribes, Favors and Phonies Behind the College Cheating Scandal. She lives in Los Angeles and writes frequently about higher education and the entertainment industry. .