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When July 1, 2009 rolls around the existing west side Jordan School District and the new east side Canyons School District will be completely independent of each other. The two districts were going to try share some district-level departments for the first couple years to ease the transition, but, that all changed last week.
Now, the Jordan District and the new Canyons District aren't working together at all, and an arbitration panel is dividing up the districts' assets because no one could agree on who gets what.
The initial proposal to share services came from the Jordan School District.
It proposed sharing district-level departments like payroll, insurance, transportation, maintenance, information systems and nutrition services.
The Canyons School District countered, highlighting issues it felt were important. Dr. David Doty, superintendent for the Canyons School District, said the district was concerned about how employees would be directed, how the cost would be shared and how long the agreement would go on.
Vice president of the Jordan School Board Carmen Freeman said, "A lot of the counter proposal also had a number of issues that we would require a great deal of negotiation, and thus we would be in a very difficult situation trying to, if we didn't come to an agreement, to find facilities to meet the needs of our students."
The Jordan School District says the Canyons District waited too long to submit its plan. Freeman said, "We stressed that in a number of memorandums, both written and verbal, and we did not hear back from them until the end of October, at which time the proposal came back and outside the time frame we were looking together."
The result is a less than amicable split, and those on west side feel they were denied input in the first place, and now have no choice but to move forward. "That issue has already been decided by the voters," Freeman said. "We could go lengthy into the legality of it and was it constitutional. We are where we are, and now we need to press forward and make the best of the situation that's before us."
"I don't think either district got the short end of the stick," Doty said. "It was a process to take a very large school district and make it into two small ones, hopefully, with the end result being more responsive to students."
The Jordan School District has already begun the 8-month relocation process and plan on signing lease agreements for new district offices this week.
E-mail: corton@ksl.com
