As the School District continues to explore ways of being more efficient, we are sharing our expertise and services with other school districts, while reducing our costs.

Recently the District created another partnership through an Intergovernmental Cooperative (Consortium) with three other school districts — Middleton-Cross Plains, Oregon, and Verona — to implement in their districts the Lawson Human Resource and Business System that the MMSD has been using over the past year.

This Consortium allows us to leverage our combined size to reduce each district's costs. In addition, the Consortium is working toward further leveraging our combined size and buying power with outside goods and services suppliers.

"Lawson has tried this (a consortium) several times with school districts and it's never happened, said Paul Cioni, Director of Marketing at Netaspx. In writing to the Consortium, he added, "This is a first in the industry and you should be very proud of the steps you've taken."

A component of the Consortium is that all school districts will be on a system housed in Minneapolis with Netaspx, where our system (hardware/software) will be maintained, supported and be ready for disaster recovery.