Agenda - 02-12-2004-6 - Laserfiche WebLink

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9. ITEMS FOR DECISION -- REGULAR AGENDA a. Next Steps on Analysis on Potential School Merger The Board considered discussing the next steps regarding the examination of potential impacts resulting from a possible merger of the Orange County Schools and the Chapel Hill — Carrboro City Schools. The following was transcribed verbatim at the request of John Link. Chair Jacobs: As we said previously, there is a new permutation, this blue color, at our places that is this agenda abstract in its most recent version. John Link: Thank you Mr. Chair and members of the Board. At your November 1 t"' work session, you discussed the elements of four individual proposals that Commissioners Brown, Gordon, Carey, and Jacobs presented that evening. In addition, you discussed to some extent the major themes that you have heard at the first two public hearings. And you also asked the County staff to respond to certain questions that you had that evening that you'd like to have answers to for tonight. And so I'm going to ask Rod Visser, Assistant County Manager to walk through briefly the material as we've tried to construct it to your benefit tonight that responds to your questions and also tries to put in some context the information that you shared as part of your proposals that evening. Rod Visser: I'll just try to point out some of the attachments that were provided in response to some of the questions the Board raised, as John pointed out, and just mention briefly the difference in the blue version of the abstract that you have in front of you compared to the one you received last week. As John noted, at the November 1 Vh work session, the County Commissioners had their first opportunity really to talk about the report and the public input that had been provided over the previous two months. We prepared this agenda item for your discussion and follow -up on that around a number of major themes. Some of the attachments are provided to help you organize your discussion about that. The first four attachments in here are the proposals presented by four of the Commissioners on November 11`h.. I won't review those in detail, because I'm sure you'll be talking about those in a couple of minutes. Three of those four proposals actually mention specifically an interest in pursuing further collaboration in conjunction with the two school systems, and part of your abstract includes a brief summary of the points from Commissioners Gordon's, Jacobs', and Brown's proposals that dealt with collaboration.. We also included just for reference purposes a draft collaboration initiative that had been developed about a year ago, pursuant to conversations between the chairs of the Board of County Commissioners and the two school boards working in conjunction with Dr. Phil Boyle at the Institute of Government. That proposal has been discussed a couple of times during the past year, but we hadn't taken any action on it in light of the analysis that was pending regarding potential merger implications and funding equity considerations. I guess it would be important to report that I talked to Phil Boyle probably about six weeks ago, and circumstances have changed.. I suppose that's not a big surprise given that a year has passed. My understanding is that Dr. Boyle is going to be leaving the Institute of Government at the end of this academic year, so it's not clear that the proposal that was developed a year ago is one that could actually be carried through. Phil did tell me that he would have some interest in doing it probably personally, but it's not clear that he'd be able to accomplish it within the time frame while he's still working for the Institute of Government. So, that said, the information that's there may still be relevant to the discussion that the Board may have about potential collaboration. E