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APPROVED 411 912 0 0 5 <br />MINUTES <br />ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS <br />WORK SESSION <br />March 15, 2005 <br />5:30 p.m. <br />The Orange County Board of Commissioners met for a Work Session an Tuesday, March 15, <br />2005 at 5:30 p.m. at the Southern Human Services Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. <br />COUNTY COMMISSIONERS PRESENT: Chair Moses Carey and Commissioners Valerie <br />P. Foushee, Alice M. Gordon, Stephen H. Halkiotis and Barry Jacobs <br />COUNTY COMMISSIONERS ABSENT: <br />COUNTY ATTORNEYS PRESENT: S. Sean Borhanian <br />COUNTY STAFF PRESENT: County Manager John M. Link, Jr., Assistant County <br />Manager Rod Visser and Clerk to the Board Donna Baker (All other staff members will be <br />identified appropriately below} <br />UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL STAFF: Dr. Madeleine Grumet <br />and Amy Anderson <br />NOTE: ALL DOCUMENTS REFERRED TO IN THESE MINUTES ARE IN THE PERMANENT <br />AGENDA FILE IN THE CLERK'S OFFICE. ALL RECORDINGS OF THE MEETING WILL BE <br />KEPT FOR 5 YEARS. <br />The meeting began at 6:14 p.m. after dinner. <br />1. Educational Excellence Work Group Report <br />Dr. Grumet said that the County Commissioners have received two versions of the report, <br />a draft and a final version. She said that there is no such thing as an average student, but <br />learning and teaching is a transaction between individual persons. The question is how to make <br />this data visible. She said that even with fabulous funding it would be possible to find a <br />bureaucratic, distant, ar discriminatory environment. Money is not everything. Nevertheless, <br />money buys people and resources. <br />She said that they interviewed principals first to understand the issue of resources from <br />their perspective. They were very impressed with the principals. After the interviewing process, <br />they looked at achievement data and they pulled a lot of information off the Internet so that they <br />would not have to bother the staff of the school systems so much. There were three questions <br />that they tried to pull together at each stage of the study -what do the principals see as <br />important issues in terms of providing resources; what does the data tell us about achievement; <br />and what does the resource data tell us about what is available to each district to accomplish <br />that? <br />She asked the County Commissioners if there were issues beyond the Executive <br />Summary or the materials in the report that should be discussed. <br />Commissioner Gordon said that it seemed to her that the variable that was isolated that <br />made the most difference had to do with the number of adults that were available in the <br />classroom. She asked Dr. Grumet to interpret the data in terms of class size. She made <br />reference to table 41, which addresses average class size. She said that the Orange County <br />School system has been working hard an reducing class size. She said that the important <br />variable might be individual attention or effective class size. <br />Dr. Grumet said that the class size in the STAR project was brought down as low as 15:1. <br />She said that the importance of class size is going to be influenced by the kinds of attention that <br />