WINCHESTER — Two
area high schools will make their pitches to local parents and students
next week, as school officials and residents continue to mull whether
Keene High School is the best option for the town’s teenagers.
A public forum for
residents to discuss and participate in the proposals from the Keene and
Pioneer Valley Regional school districts will be held at the Winchester
School Wednesday, beginning at 6 p.m.
Pioneer Valley is a regional
school district covering the Masschusetts towns of Bernardston, Leyden,
Northfield and Warwick. Its district offices and high school are in
Northfield, which abuts Winchester. The high school enrollment for this
school year is 428 students in grades 7 to 12, according to the
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Rick Horton, Winchester School
Board chairman, said Friday that officials from the two districts will
give presentations about their respective high schools’ course offerings
and curriculum from 6 to 7 p.m. Then, at 7 p.m., the school board will
open up a comment session to listen to what residents have to say about
the proposals and any other remarks or questions they may have about
high school options for students, he said. Some financial information
will also be presented, he said, including some rough numbers on what it
would cost to reopen the town’s Thayer High School and staff it.
Winchester has been sending its
high school students to school in Keene since 2003, but residents and
Winchester school officials have questioned in recent years if it’s the
best option.
“I think ultimately it would be
in our students’ best interests, and the district’s best interest, to
offer some options, and we’re not in that situation right now,” Horton
said.
It’s not just about costs, but
also how students feel in certain environments, and what opportunities
are available to them, he said.
Winchester is more than halfway
through a 20-year contract with the Keene School District to send the
town’s students to Keene High School for grades 9 through 12.
School officials signed the
contract after Winchester voters approved a warrant article to close
Thayer High School and send students who would have gone there to Keene.
Thayer High School closed in 2005.
Winchester pays tuition for its students to attend Keene High School.
That tuition started at $7,800
per regular education student, and has risen annually, as has the cost
per special education student.
This school year, Winchester is
paying about $13,000 per regular education student, and about $29,000
per special education student. About 180 Winchester students attend the
Keene school.
The increasing cost of tuition is
among the concerns residents and school officials have expressed about
Winchester students attending Keene High School.
They have also said they’ve been
frustrated by the lack of information about how Winchester students are
doing as a group at the high school, and students losing their sense of
community because they’re leaving a small, tight-knit school to attend a
high school about 30 minutes away that has a much larger student
population.
The enrollment at Keene High School for this school year is 1,363, according to the N.H. Department of Education.
Three hundred and ninety-eight students attend Winchester School in grades preschool through 8, the state agency said.
Besides Winchester, the towns of
Chesterfield, Harrisville, Marlborough, Marlow, Nelson, Stoddard,
Sullivan, Surry and Westmoreland send their high school students to
Keene. Keene High School’s enrollment is mostly made up of students from
Keene.
The majority of voters
participating in the annual Winchester School District meeting in 2012
approved an advisory-only petition warrant article to study withdrawing
students from Keene High School, and either sending them to a reopened
Thayer High School, or a high school elsewhere.
In 2014, the committee formed to
study those options presented a report to the Winchester School Board
recommending that the local school board tell the Keene school district
it’s unhappy with the arrangement, and that it will continue looking
into other options for its high school students. The school board agreed
with the report.
Last year, Winchester voters
approved a warrant article, 374 to 269, at the school district’s annual
meeting stating that it was not in the town’s best interest to tuition
its high school students to Keene.
Besides Keene and Pioneer Valley
Regional high schools, Winchester school officials have toured
Brattleboro Union and Monadnock Regional high schools as part of
studying their options for tuitioning students, Horton said.
About 1,000 students in grades 7
through 12 attend Brattleboro Middle School and Union High School from
that town and several others surrounding it.
Monadnock Regional Middle/High
School is in Swanzey, and besides that town, covers Fitzwilliam, Gilsum,
Richmond, Roxbury and Troy. At one time, it was part of the same school
administrative unit as Winchester and Hinsdale, but the union dissolved
in 2010.
Monadnock covers grades 7 through 12, and has a student enrollment of 775, according to the N.H. Department of Education
There has been no further conversations about Brattleboro or Monadnock, Horton said.
School officials have also discussed sending students to Hinsdale High School, according to previous Sentinel reports.
However, Hinsdale school
officials said at the time they wouldn’t be able to take on the
additional students because there wasn’t enough space at the high school
for them.
“Really this is about looking at
options for kids, not about ‘is one better than the other.’ These are
some options kids can have,” Horton said. “We tend to put them all in
one box when possibly there could be more options as each one learns
differently.”
Meghan Foley can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1436, or mfoley@keenesentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter @MFoleyKS.
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