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Towns weigh cutting ties to private schools

Communities that merge into districts with middle or high schools of their own face new choices.

By Edward D. Murphy emurphy@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

Maine communities that send public school students to private schools may soon be wrestling with the emotional tug of school ties versus the cold calculations of savings presented by the state's consolidation law.

The state-mandated consolidations put some towns that send their children to private schools into new districts with middle or high schools of their own – and moving the students from the private schools into those public schools could save districts millions of dollars.

Caught in the middle are schools such as Thornton Academy in Saco, which takes in Saco and Dayton high schoolers and middle and high school students from Arundel under contracts with those communities.

Regional School Unit 21, which consists of Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel, is thinking of buying out Arundel's contract to send its middle schoolers to Thornton Academy.

Arundel is paying the private school nearly $1.1 million to take its 145 students this year. Because state law largely prohibits districts from restricting student school choices post-consolidation, the students and their parents would be free to choose either Thornton Academy or the Middle School of the Kennebunks if the contract expires.

The district could save thousands if a significant number of students choose the Kennebunk school, because the district wouldn't have to pay Thornton Academy the state-mandated tuition of $7,440 per student and the Kennebunk middle school has excess capacity. And if more Arundel students go to the Middle School of the Kennebunks, more Arundel high school students would likely choose to attend Kennebunk High School instead of Thornton Academy, extending the savings.

Right now, RSU 21 and Thornton Academy are arguing over the wording of the agreement between Arundel and the private school. The agreement says that Thornton Academy will take all middle school students from Arundel, and the town will pay tuition for every student who enrolls at the school.

While Thornton Academy says the wording means that all Arundel middle schoolers must go to the private school, the RSU board argues that language saying tuition will be paid only for students who enroll at Thornton Academy suggests that not every Arundel student is required to go to Thornton.

The latter interpretation could give Arundel a way to extend school choice to all middle school students without having to pay to buy out the Thornton Academy contract, which would cost more than $1.4 million if exercised this year.

Both sides have lawyers looking at the wording and hope to have an agreement on what it means soon. In the meantime, Thornton Academy has been meeting with Arundel parents to encourage them to support continuation of the current arrangement, while the RSU expects to have results of an opinion survey of Arundel parents later this month.

It's a critical issue for Thornton, which spent nearly $3 million four years ago to renovate a building to house the middle school. All but 18 of the 163 students in the middle school are from Arundel.

Thornton Academy officials are also meeting with Dayton parents as RSU 23, which consists of Dayton, Saco and Old Orchard Beach considers an "open enrollment" policy that would allow students to attend Thornton Academy or Old Orchard Beach. But since Old Orchard Beach students would likely continue to attend their own town's school, and Saco students would probably continue to go to Thornton Academy, it would likely affect only Dayton students, giving them the option of going to Old Orchard Beach High School or Thornton Academy.

"When they talk about 'choice,' what they're really talking about is taking kids away from Thornton," said Jennifer Hass, a spokeswoman for the school.

"We have to look at what resources we have in the district that we should be maximizing," said Gary Curtis, a member of the RSU 23 board. "It would be fiscally irresponsible not to maximize the resources you have."

Hass noted that using a private school for public school students has been a boon for many towns.

"Financially, we are a great deal for these towns," she said. "They've never had to build a high school, they've never had to build a middle school."

In Thornton Academy's case, she noted, private fundraising has helped pay for the school's campus, while annual campaigns help underwrite the cost of operating the school.

The consolidation law was written to preserve the option for children to attend private schools in communities where that was the tradition, said Jim Rier of the state Department of Education.

"This choice issue was a huge part of shaping the law," he said. The bill specifically stated that if a student had the option of going to another school at the time of consolidation because his or her town didn't have one, he or she would have to continue to have that choice.

But Rier said he wouldn't be surprised to see towns and cities push for a change in the law as they start to look at the savings that could be realized by using schools in the districts they joined.

Rier said there are 11 private high schools in the state in which at least 60 percent of the students are sent by towns and cities because there is no public high school. Many of the relationships between the towns and private schools go back to the 1800s, and tinkering with that can be an issue that involves emotions as much as dollars and cents.

"It will split a town sometimes," Rier said

That's something that Thornton Academy officials are emphasizing as the RSUs debate policies and consider contracts with the private school.

"We have a 200-year relationship with the city of Saco," said Carl Stasio, Thornton Academy's headmaster. "I'm still hopeful that we can work our way through this."

Maintaining those relationships has some support from those normally concerned about costs.

Selectmen in Dayton have urged the RSU board to continue to send kids to Thornton Academy.

"We have so many parents in town who said they wanted nothing to do with Old Orchard Beach as far as sending their kids to school there," said Jim Trask, one of the town's selectmen. "It's just always been that Dayton kids go to Thornton Academy."

Old Orchard Beach High School "may be a very good school," he added, "but our kids just love going to Thornton Academy."

Staff Writer Edward D. Murphy can be contacted at 791-6465 or at:

emurphy@pressherald.com