Agenda - 10-05-1987 - Laserfiche WebLink

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345 ORANGE COUNTY Action Agenda BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS Item No. 21 ACTION AGENDA ITEM ABSTRACT MEETING DATE October 5, 1987 Subject: FORMATION OF AND CHARGE TO SHORT-LIVED FACT FINDING COMMITTEE ON EQUITY FUNDING • Department: BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS Public Hearing: Yes X no Attachments: Tnformation Contact: NONE Shirley E. Marshall Phone Numbers: 732-8181, 968-4501, 227-0231 PURPOSE: To create a short-lived, narrowly-focused fact-finding working group to: 1 . first define and then to explicate "equity" as proposed in the School Merger report; 2. to identify the questions that are being raised about "equity" within the official school community: the Boards, the Administrations and the teachers; 3. to describe the Orange County career ladder pilot program: its present impact on salaries, as well as future impacts both should the program be adopted statewide and should it be scrapped. BACKGROUND: The County Commissioners created the School Merger Task Force in response to our observations that: 1 . the amount of money available to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools would, in the immediate future, be larger than the amount provided to each school system by the per capita allocation; and 2. the uneven distribution of the taxbase no longer made the choice of sup- plemental support for the school systems an equal choice for taxpayers of the separate systems. (At present, a 2 tax on each $100 valuation would need to be paid by taxpayers in the Orange County School District to raise the same number of dollars that taxpayers in the Chapel Hill- Carrboro schools can raise by a 1 tax on each $100 valuation. ) The report of the School Merger Task Force recommended that merger not be pursued at this time. It is my sense that the county community and all three Boards agree with that conclusion. In addition, I do not sense that either the community nor any Board wants to pursue merger unless and until the General Assembly refuses any longer to fund more than one system in a county. The Merger Task Force did, however, in the strongest possible terms, ask us to address some other issues - among them equalizing the funding in the two school systems in the terms of long standing state funding policy. The appropriate time to address financial policy is during the budget process, a statement I made on accepting the report.