WINCHESTER — The Winchester School Board won’t pull the town’s students from Keene High School, even though it remains in a stalemate with its Keene counterpart about whether the teenagers can attend other schools.
Meanwhile, several Winchester
parents and community members defended Keene High School at a tumultuous
Winchester School Board meeting Monday night, saying the city school is
the best option for the town’s teenagers.
They also accused the Winchester
board of having a bias against Keene, and of not being transparent about
the process, not having respect for the public, and not having a plan
should Winchester end its tuition agreement with Keene.
“In the end, it wasn’t so much
Keene High School versus something else. It was the behavior of the
school board that had people concerned and upset because (the board) was
seeking to change schools without a plan,” said resident Chris
Thompson, who attended the meeting. “If Keene High had called the bluff,
the kids coming out right now of the Winchester School would have
nowhere to go.”
Winchester School Board Chairman
Rick Horton defended his board in an interview Tuesday, arguing that not
all Winchester students do well at Keene High, and his board’s goal is
to provide options so all students can succeed.
“The piece of it being overlooked by people, including Keene, is everybody is looking at this as an all or nothing,” he said.
The school board believes it doesn’t have to be that way, and students can have choice.
The Winchester board voted
unanimously on June 2 to notify the Keene Board of Education that unless
it agreed to modify the contract’s exclusivity clauses, which prevent
students in grades 9 through 12 from attending high schools other than
the city’s, by June 29, the Winchester board intended to terminate the
agreement, effective June 30, 2019.
The contract has been in place
since 2003, when Winchester began sending its high school students to
Keene following a town-wide vote to close the community’s Thayer High
School. That school closed in 2005.
The agreement includes a clause
allowing Keene or Winchester to terminate the agreement at any time by
giving written notice. The notice must specify the last school year for
which the contract would be in effect, which has to be at least three
full school years following the year the notice is given.
The Keene Board of Education
hasn’t called the bluff, but in a June 10 letter to Winchester
Superintendent James M. Lewis, board members said they would accept a
recent letter from the town’s school board as notice that it was
terminating the tuition agreement.
Horton responded in a June 16
letter to Robert H. Malay, superintendent of N.H. School Administrative
Unit 29, that the Winchester board didn’t vote to terminate the tuition
contract between the two school districts. It “merely voted to express
its future intent as of that date.”
Besides Keene, SAU 29 covers the Chesterfield, Harrisville, Marlborough, Marlow, Nelson and Westmoreland school districts.
Should such a vote to terminate
the contract happen, the Winchester School Board would provide notice of
termination, Horton said.
Edward R. Murdough, Keene Board
of Education chairman, responded on June 21, asking the Winchester
School Board to clarify its intentions because he said its June 16
letter conveyed a different message than an earlier correspondence.
Toward the end of Monday’s
meeting, the Winchester School Board agreed to rescind what many viewed
as an ultimatum to Keene, and not terminate the contract.
Horton said Tuesday that Winchester planned to send a letter to Keene school officials that day notifying them of the decision.
Residents and Winchester school
officials have questioned in recent years if sending the town’s high
school students to Keene is the best option.
Their concerns have included the
rising cost of tuition, frustration with what they say is a lack of
information about how Winchester students are doing as a group at Keene
High School and students losing their sense of community because they’re
leaving a small school to attend a larger one about 30 minutes away.
In 2012, the majority of voters
participating in the annual Winchester School District meeting approved
an advisory-only petition warrant article to study withdrawing the
town’s students from Keene High School, and either sending them to a
reopened Thayer High School, or a high school elsewhere.
Last year, voters at the school
district’s annual meeting approved a warrant article, 374-269, stating
it was not in the town’s best interest to tuition its high school
students to Keene.
Murdough said Tuesday Keene
doesn’t want to terminate its tuition agreement with Winchester, and has
tried to respond to all of the concerns of the town’s residents and
school board members.
He noted that of the 10 towns
sending students to Keene High School, only Winchester has consistently
expressed dissatisfaction with the arrangement.
Winchester is the largest sending
town; its 165 students represent about 12 percent of the Keene High
population of 1,334 pupils. Winchester also has the highest number of
special education students, according to Murdough.
“We’re just not willing to go
with less 100 percent (enrollment from Winchester),” Murdough said. “We
have 10 sending towns which make up 48 percent of the enrollment at
Keene High School. That’s 600 to 650 students who don’t live in Keene.”
If Keene renegotiated the
exclusivity clause in Winchester contract allowing a percentage of the
town’s students to attend the high school, the Keene board would feel
obligated to offer the same arrangement to its other sending
communities, Murdough said.
The result would be Keene school officials not knowing how many students to plan for from outside the city, he said.
“The result would be a fluctuation of about 300 students a year. You can’t run a school like that,” he said.
The Winchester School Board has
been considering Pioneer Valley Regional School in Northfield, Mass., as
an option for some of the town’s high school students.
Horton said that the Pioneer
Valley School Board discussed having an agreement of some sort with
Winchester at its meeting last week.
Winchester has received a draft
of that agreement, which, he said, outlines a partnership between the
school district, and plans to discuss the document at the school board’s
July 7 meeting.
The board will also discuss its
next steps to explore high school options for students and the
relationship with Keene, Horton said.
“We’re going to continue to look
at finding what is best for each and every student here, not just the
majority or minority, but each individual student,” he said.
Meghan Foley can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1436, or mfoley@keenesentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter @MFoleyKS.
