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Melissa Johnson, a West Jordan City Council member and mother of five, never liked the monikers "east side" and "west side" in the wake of the Jordan School District split.

"It makes us sound like we're the Jets and the Sharks fighting over territory," said Johnson, who also serves on the transition team for the remnants of the Jordan District.

References to a well-known Broadway musical aside, both sides would be hard-pressed to deny the comparison.

Now that a three-person arbitration panel has been named to equitably divide the original Jordan School District's hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets - facilities, buildings and tax revenue - the fight is about to begin in earnest. In lieu of switchblades, the weapon of choice is data - sharpened to the best arguments possible for each side's claim of the spoils.

"We're going to be really busy getting our studies done and ready to go," said Steve Newton, chairman of the transition team of the district's breakaway east side.

The west-side transition team, representing the remnant of the original district, isn't sleeping either. "We're going to have our data vetted by knowledgable people outside our team. When it's presented to the panel they'll know we've done our work," said Ralph J. Haws, team chairman.

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Defining "value": After months of contention and failure to split the assets, neither party can say for certain when arbitrators - who will be paid $300 to $400 per hour for their services - will sit down to deliberate the evidence and decide what the districts couldn't agree on by themselves. While both the new and remaining districts will argue points around different issues of school buildings and student enrollment, the arbitration panel must wrestle with how to define "value" before splitting the assets. Neither side dares predict the final, binding outcome of the arbitrators' decision. Both predict, however, that they may be equally unhappy with the outcome - perhaps the sole sign of a reasonable end to the dispute.

Residents of what is now the new district voted to break away because they didn't want their schools closed to meet enrollment and funding needs of the district's west side. It's little surprise, then, that the transition team for the new district presents its case for a share in the assets based on costs for renovation and seismic upgrade of its existing schools.

"The cost of renovations and upgrades for the east-side schools are three times what they are on the west," said Kelvyn Cullimore, Cottonwood Heights mayor and an original proponent of the split.

When protesting its exclusion from the vote last fall to split the district, the west side pointed out that growth projections for its student population exceed those of the east side. Those students would be excluded from the east side's richer share of property tax revenues funding the original district. The remaining district currently enrolls 13,000 more students than the new district, a potent figure the west-side transition team will use in jockeying for its share.

"Without even considering future growth from move-ins and births, if you count children already born and growing into school age, we will have significantly more students," said David Jordan, legal counsel for the remaining district's transition team. "The largest demographic in Herriman are the 4-year-olds." n n n

Making points: Sparring points aside, Utah law governing the breakup of school districts states any assessment of school assets following a split must be judged on current value. That demolishes any argument on student enrollment growth that the west-side district might attempt to use in front of arbitrators, Cullimore said.

The new district plans to prove to arbitrators that the deteriorating quality of its older, east-side schools means they're worth less than the west-side district's newer facilities. But that's an assertion the remaining district challenges at its core, stating that school buildings cost more in revenue than they can ever produce.

"A school is not like a car dealership. You can't sell it for money," Jordan said. "If you say you've got more new schools on the west side than the east side, it doesn't mean you have more value, just more costs."

In addition, advocates for the west district point out that east-side schools operate at an average of 70 percent capacity, while schools on the west side operate at or near capacity. Why not count potential school capacity as an asset?

"The law requires that we take student population along with each district's tax base and buildings into consideration," said Johnson, the west-side transition team member. "Capacity seems to go hand-in-hand with student population."

It's an argument Cullimore finds as cavalier as the east side telling the west it should start double sessions of school to accommodate more students. Arguments like that, he said, "totally eviscerate the purpose for the split," which was to stop schools on the east side from closing. The district's split is now a fact for that reason. To use it to score points with arbitrators is beside the point. "What I'm excited about is getting past this," Cullimore said.