City, school leaders in Saline to discuss sharing services

By Danielle Arndt K-12 education reporter

Posted on Tue, May 8, 2012 : 7:10 p.m.

Officials with Saline Area Schools and the city of Saline hope to start brainstorming ways to cut costs and share services.

The Saline Board of Education will vote Tuesday on whether to allow Superintendent Scot Graden to enter shared services discussions with the city.

City Manager Todd Campbell said some ideas were tossed around at a joint city-schools meeting in April for possibly collaborating on building and grounds maintenance, sharing information technologies services and partnering the city’s parks and recreation department with the schools' community education program.

“Obviously, it’s been a continuous thing for us to try to see how we can provide quality services to our residents as government funding continues to contract and shrink,” Campbell said.

He added the actual sharing is “step 1,000 and we’re on step No. 1.”

“We don’t know what is feasible or practical yet, but we certainly think there are some possibilities,” he said.

Campbell said the two groups plan to sit down together sometime in the near future to work on some of these things, provided the Saline Board of Education gives its OK at tonight’s meeting.

Staff reporter Danielle Arndt covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleArndt or email her at daniellearndt@annarbor.com.

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