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AI Hartkopf said that in the past, the collaboration group has came up with good items for discussion in areas of funding, usage of facilities, and being a better community citizen. He feels very positive about the collaboration efforts. Randy Copeland said that in his mind the school collaboration group has discussed school construction standards a lot and they do not seem to know what they are talking about half the time and they turn it over to the staff anyway. He said that a lot of things covered in collaboration meetings are covered in joint staff meetings. He said that they need to let staff have more leeway as to what they want to see done and then bring it back to the boards. He said that he has proposed having more joint meetings between the two school boards before the board changes the first of July. Chair Jacobs said that there was a list of topics that they wanted the collaboration group to work on, and it was set out at the beginning. Page 3 has the accomplishments in 2004. His sense of the school construction standards is that they are at a point now where they can ask staff to take the information and come back with proposals. There are policy decisions that need to be worked out such as shared recreation spaces to be built into the school construction standards. There have been chronic points of contention in the community regarding this. Libbie Hough said that she did not attend the last collaboration meeting but she did talk to Superintendent Carraway about the meeting and she seems to remember that there also needs to be a discussion about equity. She said that they need to move mare quickly on developing the definition of school equity and what it means to both school boards. She said that one of the reasons she supported discussion of construction standards was to address equity via construction standards. She thinks that the group accomplished all ten items that the two boards generated, but she is still not seeing a working definition of equity and the funding gap being addressed in a substantive manner. She wants to see a commitment to addressing how education is funded in this County. Lisa Stuckey said that she does not recall the collaboration group taking school equity on as a charge. She knows that it was proposed. She said that they talked about pages 2-3, which was the list of things they were charged to do. She said that they talked about collaborating with after-school programs, having more preschool programs in the County, and the First School initiative is something they {CHCCS) are pursuing slowly. She said that this group was not asked to solve the equity problem. Chair Jacobs said that the school collaboration group did spend a considerable amount of time talking about a new paradigm about equity, but they were not given this as a charge. He said that the Chairs and Vice-Chairs talked about funding outside the per pupil and they agreed to keep looking at the idea perhaps for health and safety positions in an equal way to each district. He said that the collaboration group could do whatever the three boards tell it to do, but he does not think that school equity is the charge at this point. Commissioner Gordon said that she thinks that the group may have not been given the charge of school equity. She said that the paint is, haw it will be done. If it is not the responsibility of the school boards nor the collaboration group, then the County Commissioners have to do it, but they want to be in partnership with the school boards. She said that we all need to be rededicate ourselves to this effort. We need to have a plan far defining equity on which we can all agree. She would define it as fairness. She said that we should have a meeting to discuss just school equity and what fair funding is, what the goals are, and how we are going to achieve them. One possibility that has been discussed is whether we should slowly raise the countywide tax and slowly lower the district tax and hold CHCCS harmless. What do the school boards think about that approach. Lisa Stuckey said that she is hearing a lot of discontent about the process. She said that she and Commissioner Gordon served on the Schools Facilities Task Force years ago and there have not been any meaningful school construction standards. She thinks that this needs