It’s tempting to think that Bruce Abbott, the business manager at Lagunitas School District, is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Shoreline Unified School District’s board of trustees unanimously voted on Thursday to hire Mr. Abbott to replace Susan Skipp, the district’s chief business official who is retiring in January. Lagunitas is looking to confront a structural deficit, but Shoreline is in the throes of its own budget crisis, with the board tackling layoff notices and facing criticism from community members for health benefits afforded to trustees and high staffing levels at the district office. But Mr. Abbott, who has worked in the San Geronimo Valley for two years, is looking forward to a bigger district and a more complex budget. (Managing school budgets is a recent career change for Mr. Abbott, who worked for 20 years in finance at Bank of America.) “Shoreline is a unified school district with a high school, so it gives me an opportunity to work with a K-12 world, so that’s exciting,” he said. “During the interview process, I definitely said as long as they’re committed to dealing with the issues, I’m happy to be there. They have a good amount of revenue. It’s just figuring out how to use it right.” Mr. Abbott was also attracted to Shoreline’s focus on project-based learning, a technique in which teachers emphasize projects that require skills from multiple disciplines; Mr. Abbott is on the board of the Buck Institute for Education, a nonprofit in Marin that educates teachers on project-based learning. He officially starts on Dec. 22, but Ms. Skipp doesn’t leave till the end of January, offering a month of overlap to get him up to speed. Meanwhile, the Lagunitas board is forming a screening and interview committee to find his replacement.