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and no change. Mr..lacobs said that his only measure of whether the districts are <br />collaborating is whether he feels they are doing so "in good faith." The goals of <br />collaboration should be helping the children in each district and malting the most of our <br />resources.. He said that collaboration requires a party to give up something, He said that <br />the group should not "seep perfection," noting that some in the County school district <br />were less than satisfied with the outcome of the collaboration around school nurses. <br />A more general discussion, follor»ed. Key points of the discussion nr°e as follows <br />It might be helpful if the districts collaborated on a shared definition of "mandate." <br />Which budget items are mandates and which are not? Which budget items are required <br />by state or federal authorities; which items are otherwise necessary to operations; which <br />fall into neither of these categories? <br />The two districts matte progress at different paces on different programs, which <br />sometimes places the City system ahead of the County system. To some City Schools <br />board members this is an awkward position to be in because they do not intend to come <br />across as superior to the County board. <br />School board members carmot control parents' voices, and so everyone should get used to <br />parents coming to the BOCC for programmatic funding, <br />Some collaborative initiatives will not be cost savings, but they still might be desirable <br />for improving students' access to opportunities. Cost efficiency should not be the only <br />measure of success. <br />BOCC members have sometimes acted disrespectfully toward the members of both <br />school districts. For example, Mr. Cools said that he was not consulted about More at <br />Four; the idea to house all pre-schoolers under one roof came "out of the blue." He said <br />that the BOCC should include the staff and elected officials who are working on public <br />education "every day" ou all matters concerning public education, rather than :going for <br />the sound bite," Similarly, a shared administrative facility "sounds good," but does not <br />matte sense if one considers that a headquarters should be centrally located to one's <br />operations. Headquarters has to be accessible to parents, for example. Also, when the <br />proposal was made to create a special committee chaired by Bill Friday no one from <br />either of two school systems was invited to participate. <br />Both districts have very tough choices to matte, but the choices sometimes are very <br />different. Perhaps the BOCC should create acategory offunding - through a county <br />wide tax, for example -that both districts together would then collaborate on distributing <br />(on an equal per pupil basis) to meet their respective needs, <br />There seems to be "two pazadigms" for collaboration. The old paradigm, which is "the <br />dance we do" and might not be changed in the short run, is to collaborate to benefit each <br />district only incrementally by finding small efficiencies on the margins or asking for new <br />funding from BOCC, We might call this "efficiency within the current structure." But a <br />4 <br />