A parent at Seven Arrows almost got hit by a car this week. She was in the crosswalk at Ocean Park and Centinela with the light, and somebody drove straight through it like she wasn’t there. She’s fine. (If you’ve ever driven that corner, you know that’s less of a freak accident and more of a Tuesday.) She told the parent group what happened. By lunch there was a plan. By drop-off the next morning there was Margarita in the intersection holding a stop sign and coffee, ready to stop feral cars the way she literally stopped Aldersgate from burning the night of the Palisades Fire. She didn’t form a committee. There was no email sent about exploring options. It was just her in an orange vest ready to make that intersection part of the 7a community.
Meanwhile, over at McKinley, the public school parents did it the official way. Dozens of them wrote the City Council asking for barriers at one crossing on Santa Monica Boulevard, in letters so nearly identical you know somebody made a template and passed it around (we’ve all done it). A Kia dealership on the same block pushed back because it wanted to keep its left turn. There were public comments. There were planning commissioners. And in May the council finally voted, unanimously, to put in temporary barriers before this school year. (I’d love to tell you whether they’re in yet, but I’d have to drive Santa Monica Boulevard at pickup to find out, and I’m not doing that.) That’s months, a dealership, and a city council. Margarita got there the next morning.
If you know Margarita, this is not surprising at all. Real estate is sort of her specialty, and claiming buildings is a specialty. She did it for ten years before she ever opened a school, and as far as I can tell she never really stopped. (How DID she end up with the historic Aldersgate building as the Seven Arrows lower school campus? The STEAM lab was an 1892 house that got cut in half and hauled to the Palisades by trucks and mule teams. Wtf?)
Back to present day. Look at the moves. This is their second since the fire (okay, third if you count the Boys and Girls Club in 2025). The first one was also by the airport, right on Clover Park, in what was literally just an office building. And if you know Margarita, you know she loves her outdoor space (she was like BFFs with Jane Goodall... 7A had front-row seats to her speaking engagement in LA last year. Except... well... when they arrived, they found out she died. But that's another story I won't be writing about). So the office building was never going to stay just an office building. All of a sudden Seven Arrows had half the parking lot, gated off with those rental fences and turfed over. And the joke goes that a few weeks later, the yard got bigger. And bigger.
Now they’ve landed for good, still on the edge of the Santa Monica Airport. So if you can stomach breathing in the jet fuel from being literally on the airport runway, and the fifty-plus thousand a year, and the fact that they will ask you for more money (a lot, they’re sort of famous for it), you get something most of these schools stopped offering a long time ago.
You get a say. And you get it fast.
Seven Arrows finished last year thirty-four thousand dollars ahead. Which is pretty impressive for a school that lost its building, but pennies compared to some of the schools you toured that ended seven and eight million ahead. But with those schools, I would bet you real money nobody from any of them was standing in a crosswalk this week, especially their heads of school. They have the money. They have somebody with “community” in their title. So what’s their excuse? They don’t have one. They have an email.
So yes, they’re going to ask you again in November. Probably twice. And the same woman who will absolutely find you at pickup about the annual fund is the reason there’s now a crossing guard stop sign on Centinela. You don’t get one without the other.
Will Margarita give the street back? Probably not. Ask the parking lot.
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