Agenda - 04-25-2006-1 - Laserfiche WebLink

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not have the time to walk with their children, and they value the time in the car when they can be together. Also, she said, many neighborhoods in Chapel Hill and Carrboro do not have sidewalks, stop signs or traffic signals. People are speeding through neighborhoods, and it is not safe for students to walk. An additional challenge is the number of buses: the district could not accommodate an influx of riders if a majority of parents and students switched suddenly from cars to the school bus. Finally, Ms. Stuckey said, it would be very hard to tell high school students that they cannot drive to school. Nevertheless, she added, she strongly supports walking, biking and bus riding. • Ms. Sharma said that wealthier families are more likely to insist on driving to school than families with lower incomes. • The Chapel Hill— Carrboro City Schools has a successful partnership with the public library. One general concern in the community is that elementary students should not be exposed to certain works of fiction that might otherwise be found in a public library. District and library officials have "wrestled with who has firs dibs" on how the shared facility is operated. • Mr. Taynton said that in Cumberland County the school district's partnership with recreation programs has been "very successful" in part because the district chose a larger site in order to accommodate the two sets of users. He added that elementary fields were equipped with removable backstops because the younger students were playing soccer but not baseball, while community users wanted to play baseball as well as soccer. • Mr. Burriss said that partnerships are most successful when the parties' attitudes are collaborative. In Wake County, the parties all got together and looked at the cost savings from sharing relative to renting additional facilities to meet everyone's needs. Parks and Recreation offered to provide maintenance for the shared athletic fields because they already had the equipment and staff to do this. Scheduling is left to two people at the staff level, the policy makers are kept out of it, "and it works." The high school facilities are used "all the time" for team practice, and the local governments accept this and schedule community uses around the school's needs. But at the same time "the principals are flexible." The point is that we do not come to the table for the purpose of confrontation; we come to make it work for all of us. • In response to a question from Ms. Stuckey, Mr. Burriss said that WCPSS is using artificial turf in game fields but not on practice fields. • Mr. Burriss added that the best way to approach joint use is to master plan the site first, and then to divide the uses afterward. "Take a twenty acre parcel, master plan the campus, and then split it among the partners." There may be different ownership of different portions of a parcel, he said, and /or it may be that different users rent different spaces from each other. • The attorneys should be involved ahead of time to work out all the insurance and legal arrangements, he added. WCPSS now has standard partnership agreements that it uses for its joint use initiatives. • Mr. Taynton said that parties may be motivated to share facilities when, for example, a community demands a full sized school gym and a Board of County Commissioners does not fund it. This then threatens classroom size and gives the school district reasons to find a creative solution. • In response to a question from Commissioner Halkiotis, Mr. Burriss said that the school district has a rental schedule for its facilities that is based on a full audit of each facility's costs to the district. Community rentals are an "enterprise system" for the district, he said. "We even charge the Boy Scouts," he said. 5