By Patrick Adrian
EAGLE TIMES STAFF
CROYDON — Public debate continues to intensify for Croydon’s school budget, with parental concerns about school choice taking center stage.
Croydon residents filed a petition this week with the Croydon School District requesting a revote on the town’s school budget for the 2022-2023 school year. The petition, which contains 145 signatures, seeks a special meeting to vote on whether to increase the approved budget of $800,000 to the original proposal of $1.7 million.
On Wednesday the Croydon School Board said they will begin the procedure toward scheduling the special meeting, a process that will take approximately 21 days.
State law requires that a public hearing must take place prior to approving a special meeting. In addition, the public must have seven days notice of a scheduled public hearing and there must be at least a 14 day separation between the public hearing and special meeting.
A successful overturning of the approved budget would arguably provide the quickest resolution to Croydon’s funding conundrum, when voters at Croydon’s annual Town Meeting amended the district’s recommended budget to cut it by 53 percent, and then passed by a 20-14 vote.
Under state statute for special meetings, at least half of Croydon’s 565 registered voters must cast a ballot for the outcome to be valid.
Regardless of the special meeting, the Croydon School Board must still submit a budget to the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration by a deadline of April 1, which is only eight days away.
“I looked into getting an extension on filing our budget report, but the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration said we cannot,” said Croyon School Board Chair Jodi Underwood on Monday.
With only eight days left to finalize a budget, the Croydon School Board faces an arduous, possibly Sisyphean challenge to fund an adequate education for Croydon’s nearly 80 K-12 students on less than half the budget that was recommended.
Central to this challenge is funding Croydon’s school choice plan, which has been the district’s lynchpin to educating its students in grades 5-12. Croydon’s lone school, the Croydon Village School, only serves grades K-4.
For grades 5-12, representing about 49 Croydon students, Croydon tuitions students to a choice of contracted schools, including public and private options. The majority of these students, 20 of the 49 students, attend the Newport School District, which serves as Croydon’s anchor district.
But the Croydon district originally recommended a budget of $983,400 to fund its out-of-district tuitions, more than the total budget that Croydon voters appropriated.
The board stressed on Monday that they want to preserve the school choice program. However any possibility of that will require the contracted public schools, particularly Newport, to significantly negotiate their tuition agreement.
“It’s going to be a heavy lift to negotiate out of those contracts,” Superintendent Frank Perotti told the board on Monday. “Those districts have already passed their budgets on the assumption that they had certain revenue coming in that we had promised.”
Newport, for example, increased its tuition rate 15 percent for next year from $16,079 to $17,880 per pupil.
Meanwhile, the amended Croydon budget only aimed to appropriate a maximum of $10,000 per pupil, which in actuality would be considerably less once subtracting obligatory district costs such as special education, transportation, and administrative services.
In addition, an overlooked detail in Croydon’s agreement with Newport, presented on Monday by former Croydon board member Angi Beaulieu, guarantees Newport a payment of at least half the total tuition next year for Croydon’s anticipated enrollments. This amount for 20 estimated students would be about $178,800, which Croydon would contractually owe regardless of whether those students attend next year.
“So now we’re coming down to a number around $400,000 to educate our children,” Beaulieu noted. “It’s not really $800,000, because we have to pay that [other] money no matter what.”
The board also said it plans to consider the use of “learning pods”, sometimes referred to as “micro schools”, a contracted program which provides individualized instruction to learning groups of approximately five to 10 students.
Prenda, a New Hampshire-based educational service provider, has a curriculum aligned to New Hampshire learning standards and provides instructors, who would provide instruction in Croydon.
Prenda only serves students in grades K-8, so the board said they would have to study the possibility of contracting KaiPod Learning, a Massachusetts-based company, to set up a microschool for Croydon’s high schoolers. another program,
Board members indicated that Prenda might be utilized at the elementary school level to reduce operating costs of the Croydon Village School, to divert additional funds toward the school choice tuition.
The Croydon board has held three meetings since the budget’s passage on Saturday, Mar. 12. While these meetings were intended as “working meetings” to develop a budget under $800,000, the first two meetings were overtaken by public questions and comments, both ending without the board establishing any specific plan of action regarding meeting with school districts or learning pod contractors.
The board held a non-public meeting on Monday to discuss personnel matters and had intended to host a presentation about Prenda on Wednesday, which the board canceled after families expressed disinterest in the presentation.
reporter @eagletimes.com
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