Schools
Summit Board of Education Looks for Ways Districts Can Share Resources
Tri-County Boards for Quality Education was started three years ago by Summit BOE member Eleanor Doyle.
Eleanor Doyle wanted to know what was going on in other school districts. So, as a member of the Summit Board of Education, she started the Tri-County Boards for Quality Education, a group of representatives from several school districts.
“When I was president of the Summit Board of Education two years ago, I thought it would be a very good idea,” Doyle said. “At the time we were about to embark on negotiating our teacher contracts, and I realized we didn’t have information on how other districts were handling theirs. I thought we could get contiguous groups together to see how we handle issues, with the eye toward seeing if we could grow this for shared services.”
The group, which includes representatives from the school boards of Summit, Scotch Plains-Fanwood, Westfield, New Providence, Berkeley Heights, Chatham, Madison, Millburn, Livingston, Springfield, and Cranford, has two main goals: to explore opportunities for shared services and to share best practices.
One of the first topics they discussed collectively was health care costs.
“We’ve all been trying to understand what our relative health care costs are to see if there are best practices we can learn from one another to reduce health care costs. That’s been our thrust for first couple of years,” Doyle said.
The group doesn’t meet often — only about three times a year — but Doyle says that hopefully they can work toward more meetings in the future if it’s feasible. They last convened in September, with SP-F representatives Anthony Del Sordi and Donald Parisi attending.
“Because it’s a large group, it’s relatively difficult to get that many people together,” she said, adding that superintendents are not involved, but are aware of the meetings.
The group has already prompted some board members to work together on issues that they’ve identified as common among their districts.
One example includes Summit allowing students from New Providence to attend its district’s autism program. Other opportunities may also exist where schools can share language teachers. Doyle said a lot of districts are interested in implementing a Mandarin Chinese class, but don’t have the need to hire someone full-time.
“There’s a lot of interaction among board members, we just haven’t been able to identify a specific area that lends itself to the whole group sharing,” she said. “There’s the possibility of working together to reduce health care costs, but that’s proven to be a difficult subject. It will take time for us to evolve.”
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