Superintendent's Newsletter
August 20, 2019
PD Day collage
We Are Ready to Welcome our Students Tomorrow!
I hope that all of you have had a wonderful summer with your families. It's been a busy summer here! Our facilities people have been working all summer long with construction projects (see below) and annual preparations. Our principals and administrators started weeks ago, and we all met together last week. All of our teachers and staff met yesterday, and as I send this out we are finalizing our preparations for the 2019-20 school year. We thank the Kinecta Federal Credit Union for feeding lunch to all of our employees yesterday! We welcome our new Kindergartners, who will become the Mira Costa Class of 2032 (Gulp!). Our Board has prepared new goals for the school year. Please see them here , and let me know if you have any suggestions, as the Board will approve a final version at this Thursday's meeting. I hope you all have a wonderful school year!
gym collage
Gym Construction Progress - It's been a busy summer!
We broke ground for the new Mira Costa gym back on February 15, and we are making excellent progress! The pictures above show (clockwise from top right): the concrete slab placement; the structural steel for the pavilion gym; and the concrete slab and curbs that will form the footprint of the team rooms and locker rooms.

We are grateful to the voters of Manhattan Beach for passing Measure EE and making this project a reality. Here are a couple fun facts to share at the dinner table: approximately two hundred tons of rebar have been installed within the concrete slabs and footings to date, which is about the same weight as one blue whale or forty elephants. And my fellow swimmers will appreciate this one: approximately 9,000 cubic yards of soil have been hauled off the site to create the grade for the new Athletic Complex. That is almost enough to fill up three Olympic-size swimming pools.

Thanks to the teams from Gensler (our gym architect), Balfour Beatty (our contractor), and our MBUSD Operations staff for their tireless work to make these plans a reality. We are still planning on opening the gym in the fall of 2020!
Pacific Collage
Renovations at Pacific
This summer, we started the first of our elementary school renovation projects at Pacific Elementary School. We installed new roofs (actually, we re-roofed buildings on every campus), added air conditioning, replaced old flooring with new laminate flooring (it looks great!), repainted the whole campus, replaced the sliding glass doors, and much more. Construction crews began work immediately after the final bell of school on June 13, and never stopped. Our teachers began moving back into their rooms yesterday, and final preparations are still in process, but we will be ready for students tomorrow!

Thanks to every single MBUSD employee that helped at Pacific, to Balfour Beatty and everyone involved with the construction crew, and to the architects from DLR who made all of this work happen in an extremely timely manner! It was a true team effort and we actually finished on time. Now we start planning this work for more campuses this next summer!
Welcome back and have a spectacular year!
Mike Matthews
MBUSD Superintendent
Manhattan Beach Unified School District

325 S. Peck Avenue
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
310.318.7345