By Bella Osgood
EAGLE TIMES STAFF
The future of Croydon students attending Newport schools is uncertain.
At a Newport School Board (SAU 43) meeting on June 29th, members of the Croydon School Board (SAU 99) attended to discuss tuition contracts between the two districts.
The Croydon School District received a letter just three days before the meeting and four days before the expiration of its contract stating that Newport had decided to dissolve the agreement that allows Croydon students to attend Newport schools while paying tuition.
This three-year contract could have automatically rolled “into the next year as is” if no changes were made.
If the contract is not renewed, Croydon students will have to pick a “second choice school.”
The June 29th School Board meeting was originally meant to ratify the decision not to renew the contract, rather than discuss the issue, Newport Superintendent Donna Magoon said. Regardless, Croydon’s School Board members expressed urgency in resolving the problem, requesting to meet with Newport officials as soon as possible.
In the past, Newport has been Croydon’s “school of record,” meaning Newport must accept any and all Croydon students.
Currently, there are about 19 Croydon students who go to Newport in fifth through 12th grades, who each pay about $19,000 per year in tuition costs. If Croydon students did not attend Newport schools in the future, Newport would be losing revenue, which could result in a tax impact on town residents.
The two schools previously met on May 25, but each district claims a different purpose for the meeting.
Croydon says the meeting was to “discuss Croydon students and how they are doing overall” and that the two administrations would meet at a later date to discuss the contract and tuition.
Magoon says she did attempt to contact SAU 99 but was not successful. She described the gist of one of her messages to Perotti as the following: “Hey, it’s urgent, I need you to call me. You have a letter coming in the mail, and I want to talk about it before I just send it to you.”
Magoon later stated that she “wanted to do the respectful thing and have a conversation with him [Perotti] and explain what it [dissolving the contract] meant.”
She added that the Croydon school district was aware that the contract would expire on June 30.
“It’s not saying we don’t want any of these students. Absolutely we do. The tuition is great for us. I just need to make sure that if I’m getting a child [from an outside school], and say the tuition is 13k that I am not spending 20k, because then the additional money would be coming from Newport residents. It’s also not fair to the student; it’s not fair for me to say ‘yes, we’ll take your child, but we don’t have the services that they need,’” Magoon said.
Magoon said the school district needs to make sure they can meet the needs of each child and does not want to take on additional students if they cannot meet the needs of their own Newport students.
Newport, she said, is looking to lower the cost of tuition for Croydon students and hopes to make tuition for all districts that send students to Newport, such as Goshen, the same.
“We want to look at what we can do for your kids, that is why we are not moving forward with this contract [as it is currently],” she concluded.
Croydon School Board member Angi Beaulieu said she is “optimistic that we can find a solution that works for both school districts and all of our students.”
The two schools plan to meet to negotiate these changes to tuition and contract agreements at a later date.
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