Salt Lake City and the Salt Lake City School District are joining forces to help both entities get the biggest bang for their buck when it comes to educating students.

And in working together, leaders from both organizations say they hope to be able to provide more educational services for Salt Lake City residents.

"We are working in a collaborative effort to see how we can better serve the youth of this city. Education is the primary concern for most households — our future is dependent on an educated work force and the viability and vitality of our economy," said Joanne Milner, who is at the helm of the initiatives.

In February, Mayor Ralph Becker named Milner, who is a former Salt Lake City councilwoman and state legislator, as the city's education partnership coordinator, an unprecedented position in the mayor's office.

The idea was to get the school district and city working together, pooling resources, eliminating duplication of efforts and working collaboratively on a number of issues specific to Salt Lake City.

"We are going to be looking at ways to constantly have better communication between the city and school district to better serve our constituency," said McKell Withers, superintendent of Salt Lake School District. "Joanne, with her background is posed to do this really well."

Milner also grew up in Salt Lake City and has spent the past 13 years working in the school district and also with refugee and minority populations.

Milner said some of the immediate initiatives include putting together a symposium of policymakers and educators to take a hard look at the achievement gap and craft ways to effectively address it — be it through creating more early education opportunities for at-risk students, corporate partnerships or other programs.

She said they will also be working on initiatives aimed at growing the city's own minority teachers, administrators and city leaders to better match the demographic of the city to "be more reflective of the population that they are serving."

She said other efforts will include looking at ways to involve the corporate sector in improving education and providing more opportunities since the business community has a vested interest in the quality of education. Leaders also want to streamline efforts in the district's and city's after-school programs.

"The future of any city is the strength of families and kids and how those investments with kids and families turn into people who want to remain in that community and make it better," Withers said. "This kind of an effort and this kind of proactive collaboration in investing in the future is an effort to do that with kids and families."

---

E-mail: terickson@desnews.com