This is a summary of Washington County Board of Education members speaking before the County Commissioners. Here is the link to the video.
This meeting was not listed on the Board's page of meeting dates on the website. I placed it under "joint meeting" since they were with the commissioners.
April Zentmeyer: Believes the county commissioners and the school board have the same purposes, priorities and primary goals: to do more with less. Where do our services overlap -are there any that might be unified to save the taxpayers of this county without sacrificing services…. Some things that come to mind are healthcare, libraries, snow removal, transportation, maintenance...
County Administrator Michelle Gordon: A few comments regarding cost shifting although it would create significant savings potentially for the Board of Education it would most likely create significant expense for Washington County government.
Commissioner Derek Harvey: There are opportunities to identify efficiencies and then I think you look at where the compatibility is… I can see efficiencies in the library right off the bat- that might open up space for the school system- I don’t know if that would lead to any reduction in the management team, and people that work in the libraries and the librarians. There’s all kinds of ways to get books and support materials.
And if the library county system has those holdings why duplicate them at the library at the schools? That might be one area, The missing party here is the county library system.
Randy Wagner: I tend to agree with the whole theory- when you combine purchasing things you save some money.
My biggest concern would be- what’s the collateral damage to Washington County Public Schools and watch the collateral damage to Washington County government.
Linda Murray: I have a question for my team because this wasn’t explained to me. When you talk about combining libraries would that mean our media specialist would work with Washington County library?
April Zentmeyer: No. The library thing is an idea where we need space. We have the books in our library. We need our media specialists. This is just an idea of like when Williamsport builds a library on our campuses and kids have access to that library there are going to be duplicated services..
the library thing is an idea where we need space we have the books in our library, we need our media specialist, this is just an idea of like when Williamsport builds a library on our campus’s and kids have access to that library they are going to be duplicated services..
Linda Murray: We have to take into consideration that our library media specialists provide planning time…
April Zentmeyer: Noone‘s talking about that..
Linda Murray: I’m just trying to get clarification, I wasn’t involved…
April Zentmeyer: It’s like our new health walk-in system, that’s a wonderful benefit that we provided our part of the county. Could it be provided to yours as well? This is simply an exploration of any duplicated services.
Mike Guessford: We’re trying to find ways that we can collaborate. We’re here to work together to save money.
Darrell Evans: To add to your point, Ms. Gordon, at the end of the day very a large portion of our money comes from you guys. For example, you buy maintenance vehicles and we buy maintenance vehicles. Are they really used that much for us to have our own sets of
them? For example, this morning I was walking my dog and three school buses literally were taking the exact same route. One of them was a lift bus for kids with special needs. Another one was a typical public school bus, and another one was a Head Start school bus.
It gets a little tricky when we’re talking about students with special needs. That requires some extra services; but The Head Start bus and the typical school bus, is that something, I don’t know, is that something for a deeper conversation? When we look at our purchasing
a lot of times we are putting out bids for similar services and some of the things I was looking at. Like you guys need extra help with snow removal and sometimes we do as well.
April Zentmeyer: And, so that’s the bottom line. We want to save our taxpayers money. We do not want to have collateral damage or hurt the students.