By Shivani Patel
After a year of presentations and subsequent revisions to parents, community members and other stakeholders, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education is ready to move forward to the next step in developing the new Malibu High School campus plan: finding an architect.
The approval was given to staff at the last board meeting, held at Malibu City Hall, on Thursday, Nov. 7. Leading up to the meeting, staff, along with members of design firm LPA, held more than 50 stakeholder meetings and focus groups since September 2018.
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- The design focuses on a handful of core elements, including:
- Circulation (getting vehicles in and out, off of Morning View Drive)
- Identity (creating a unique and separate identity for the middle school as well as the high school)
- Site topography (taking advantage of the views and space that MHS currently occupies)
- Safety (including fencing and other safety mechanisms, while still allowing for community gathering)
Tapia presented the current site map—”a jumbled sort of amalgamation of buildings that have been accumulated over multiple decades”—to the current proposed plan, which features a clearly defined campus for the middle school and high school, with shared spaces in between.
This plan would keep middle school buildings to the right and the high school buildings to the left. This, in part, was due to parking spaces; the smaller lot (the first that comes up when you turn onto Morning View from Pacific Coast Highway) would better serve the middle school. A larger lot, located near the high school buildings, would serve the abundant student drivers.
