BREWER, Maine — School officials have learned that the state-set nonresident tuition rate has decreased by nearly $200, dropping the rate for fiscal year 2011-12 to $7,805, which is nearly $1,028 less than what Bangor is getting.
Since 317 of the 700 or so students at Brewer High School come from outlying communities, the drop in tuition revenues is hard to swallow, School Department business manager Gretchen Gardner told the Brewer School Committee on Monday.
“This latest news is another setback of $170,925 this year,” she said.
The hit is especially hard because it accompanies a projected state subsidy decrease of $213,000 in general purpose aid, which is still a fluid number, Superintendent Daniel Lee said.
“The state is working hard to fill a budget deficit” and is chopping away at the Department of Health and Human Services budget, he said. If more cuts are needed, “the next pile of money is education. I’m not confident we will not see a curtailment this year.”
The only thing schools can do is wait and see what happens in Augusta, the superintendent said.
“We’ll monitor it and monitor it closely, but frankly we’re all concerned,” Lee said.
The state Department of Education sets the dollar amounts school districts can charge for nonresidents to attend their high schools based on spending the prior year.
The tuition rate is a guessing game every year for Brewer school officials, who must estimate how many students from outside of town will attend the high school and also calculate how many students will go to the United Technologies Center.
Brewer budgeted last year for 326 tuition students at last year’s tuition rate of $8,005 per student, Gardner said, but the actual number of out-of-town students turned out to be 317 at the newly decreased tuition rate of $7,805 each.
The projected figures for this year also listed 30 vocational students, which the state reimbursed at $5,334 per student. The number of tuition students who are actually taking voc classes this year increased to 45, and Brewer is only getting $5,203 for each, she said.
Bangor’s rate, on the other hand, has increased fairly steadily for the last five years, according to data on the Department of Education’s website.
This year, Bangor is getting $293 more per student as the state increased its tuition rate from $8,540 to $8,833.
The state average grew slightly from last year’s $8,798 to $8,832 for 2011-12, an increase of $34.
Gardner and Lee have been vocal over the last couple years in warning the public about projected decreases in state revenue, in what they called “the cliff.” With known revenue decreasing on the horizon, they cut all nonessential spending and asked school leaders to tighten belts wherever possible.
“This is a recurring theme,” Lee said.
There is a special workshop meeting planned for 6 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23, for the school board to review the state’s tuition calculation.
Go Rams!
Agreed. Why would you ever pay to go to Brewer? Only $1000 more per year to go to the best public high school in the state? Sounds like going to Bangor is a steal of a deal.
“the best public high school in the state”…
Yeah, funny how that school is in too damned liberal Bangor, too.
Who said you have to connect the dots ?
Well it’s hard not to have a fairly large base of decent students when the residents in Bangor don’t have the choice of diverting to Bapst for free and being a member of the beautiful-people society. Not to mention that 95% of Bangor is white middle income to upper-middle income kids who tend towards being decent students. If you look at the sending districts of Veazie and Glenburn you’ll notice a drop in academic proficiency since they have the option of going to Bapst for free if they can get in, but they are only a small portion of Bangor’s enrollment as compared to the huge numbers lost from Brewer in kids from Dedham, Holden, Orrington, Eddington, Aurora, Clifton, etc… . So Bangor being relatively better than Brewer or other schools in the state is due mostly to sending district issues or the fact that they are culturally square in a low-crime / low-poverty city (unlike Lewiston or Portland). Not to mention that all the Asian students (lots of them) bring Bangor’s test scores way up like a pack of ravenous level-50 archmages running wild in the first level of a D&D game. So, liberal city = reason for awesome school……. ah, no. And I wouldn’t go calling Bangor a “Liberal city” per-se. Portland area is liberal, Lewiston is liberal, Bar Harbor / MDI is liberal. Bangor is sort of 50/50 with a bunch of namby-pamby independent fence-sitters filling up the political ranks because they are too chicken to pick a side or because they like that warm-fuzzy feeling of being “non-partisan”.. ughh… hurl.
You went all round the bush comparing a private school, with selective admittance requirements to a public one, brilliantly .
The comparison was between Bangor and Brewer and why there is a general notion of a disparity in quality of education based on average academics. The explanation of Bapst was just to point out that the comparison can not be made squarely since the two student bodies (Bangor & Brewer) are apples & oranges based on sending district dynamics and why certain students steer away from Brewer to go to Bapst whilst smarter Bangor students don’t/can’t steer away from Bangor (for free anyway). Point being that Bangor isn’t really all that much better, they just have a much lower ratio of special-ed / vocational students to traditional students, and this makes their averages higher.
That is because they drop out of school . Maybe Bangor isn’t as good a school for some.
This is a conservative plot to turn Brewer High into a regional vocational high school.
Think their beloved school vouchers agenda , if you don’t get the politics behind it.
Interesting, but wrong. The voc students cost $1000 more per year, and if they did that they would really alienate the traditional students who come from Brewer and don’t have the choice of attending Bapst for free like the outlying districts who send to Brewer. Also the teachers union would never allow it since they would have to know that being a voc school would terminate at least 50% of them.
How did you bring John Bapst Memorial High School into this? And for your information, those outer-laying towns have to pay for those students that get ACCEPTED into John
Bapst….it’s not a “free” ride! Sounds like you’re a John Bapst hater? Why, because they have worked hard, gotten great grades and have a desire to attend school and took the time to complete the application, write the essays, and do an interview…I live in Ellsworth and I am willing to pay tuition for my child to attend John Bapst Memorial High School..it’s the best around!!
They only pay an amount equal to the public schools, too, and the student’s families pay the difference in the private school tuition.
My point is…no one goes to Bapst for free…thank you very much. I pay my taxes in Ellsworth….so my portion of my taxes that goes to the school funding goes to Ellsworth schools and I don’t even send my child there….so I am helping pay someone elses portion…should I ask for a refund?
Yes, but what you don’t understand is that those sending districts are sending those kids to Bapst for no cost to the parents, so they are suggesting that they will fund kids going to Bapst as much as they will fund kids going to Brewer. I’m not so much saying that this is wrong (though I’m making fun of the rationale of many parents as to why they do this and specifically live in these towns), but I am merely pointing out what the end result is to Brewer’s student population as far as the academic dynamic and why it costs so much more per student at Brewer on average than it does at Bangor. And how this is bad given how Brewer’s allowable tuition charge rate was just slashed. This being the case, Brewer had ought to either charge more for kids coming from outside of Brewer, or force exclusivity contracts on the sending schools which would require them to send kids to Brewer or else send them elsewhere or build their own high school. Brewer doesn’t have to be forced to take all the dredged up Bapst non-qualifiers at the going rate, but nobody has the guts to do anything about it. The whole sending district issue for Brewer is the number one reason that they have lower GPA, lower enrollment numbers, and supposed lower quality issues over the past 15 years. This has happened as Bapst has become secular and as towns like Holden use the Bapst school option as a high-brow selling point for potential residents. I am generally for private schools, but the way it has panned out in Brewer with them not charging more for sent students and not making exclusivity contracts is poorly played. Also, if Brewer / Bangor residents had an option to send kids to Bapst for free, then I would care a whole lot less about the issue.
When the conservatives start to care about
alienating students or their teacher’s (unions) ?
I didn’t say I cared about the unions, I just said how they would react. I didn’t say that I cared or didn’t care about students, I was referring to the disparity in cost for certain types of students.
Dan Lee should have also mentioned the fact that due to the unusually high number of kids who go to Bapst from Brewer’s sending districts (because of their wannabe “beautiful people” parents whose s*&t doesn’t smell) instead of Brewer, that Brewer is left with a disproportionately high number of vocational students who go to the technical center in Bangor. These students cost about $1000 more per year. So Brewer is really getting hammered on per-student cost. This also leaves Brewer with a relatively higher rate of special-ed kids who are more expensive because all of the Bapst kids being musical (albeit pot-smoking) savants who drain Brewer of Academic depth. So Brewer has to have a higher rate of special-ed teachers as compared to traditional teachers which is also more costly. I can only say thank God to D’arcy Main-Boyington who is working hard to ramp up Brewer’s tax base via business development.
Just what makes you think Brewer is ENTITLED to a monopoly on the tuition payments of the neighboring towns?
One good reason would be that Brewer high school never has a very clear picture of what their freshman enrollment will be as compared to other schools. Most all schools in the state have a very clear picture of what their budget needs to be years ahead, but Brewer, above all other schools in the state, does not. The level of uncertainty created by the fact that the outlying sending districts send so many kids to Bapst for the same (free) tuition that they might otherwise pay to Brewer is strange. Or else they don’t care about paying more and just use it as a selling point to attract certain types of high-taxable residents (Holden). It’s not that the outlying schools should be forced to send kids to Brewer, but they either need to pay much more than they do per student since they tend to send disproportionately high numbers of vocational / special-ed kids, or else they need to enter into an exclusivity contract with Brewer (receiving a much lower price per student) and be forced to send all kids to Brewer and not offer to pay freely for private school enrollment. This would leave the parents in those towns with the same options as parents in Brewer or Bangor – to pay for their own tuition if Bapst enrollment is desired. The trade-off is that the towns would save a lot of money and taxes could be lowered. It’ll never happen though since the councils in the sending towns have no guts. If the towns don’t like the idea of paying more for students sent to Brewer, or entering an exclusivity contract, then they could always build their own high school.
So everyone else should be forced to settle for Brewer just to make Brewer’s budget calculations easier?
What you REALLY mean is that you let that gold-plated superintendent talk you into building a palace that you couldn’t afford and now you want your neighbors to subsidize your foolishness. Maybe you ought to send that superintendent and his entourage down the road, get your expenses in line, and start kicking some teacher butt. You start turning out a superior product for a reasonable price and you will be buried by the tuition checks.
It might have been nice to know that before the budget was done; but, then the Governor doesn’t think that fast, nor do his underlings. It’s really difficult to make up that much of a shortfall.
All of these mentioned schools are graduating some terriffic kids that go on to accomplish much in life . My daughter graduated from Brewer High School with High Honors because she had excellent teachers and studied hard. Her name now begins with Dr. One could easily find similar success stories at any of our area High Schools. It’s up to the kids and parents to find success. The name over the front door won’t hand it to you.
Wow Bangor might have higher test scores but also has a higher
dropout rate than brewer. Brewer kids tend to come from a slightly lower socieconomic background. I know you can not compare the 2 . I can rationalize a lower class kid would be beter off going to brewer (less chance of dropping out). Also some of Bangors higher test scores Is because they have a higher dropout rate Good Job Betsy Webb. I can see her $140k A year is well worth NOT.