Newfound Area School District signs tuition agreement with Hill

BRISTOL — The Newfound Area School Board has approved a rolling 13-year tuition contract with the Hill School District, guaranteeing students entering the system as kindergartners will be able to remain in Newfound through graduation. Along with that agreement were memoranda of understanding with Hill and the new Pasquaney School District, setting a $200 fee for sixth grade students wishing to take part in middle school athletics and co-curricular activities.

Hill’s current 10-year tuition contract will expire on June 30, 2024, and the two school districts have been working on a contract extension for the past year. The new agreement is effective July 1, 2024, which is the same date three towns which currently belong to the Newfound Area School District will be leaving to operate their own district. That meant school board members from those towns were unable to vote on Hill’s tuition agreement.

The new agreement would “automatically annually renew each year, renewing the term of 13 years on the anniversary of the fiscal year end of June 30th ... The purpose behind a perpetual (13) year term offers assurance that any Hill student entering Kindergarten at Jennie D. Blake Elementary School shall reasonably expect to attend middle school and high school in the Newfound School District for the duration of their time in school.”

Hill provides education through sixth grade, after which students attend Newfound schools and have access to all co-curricular activities offered in that district. The memorandum of understanding which the board also approved allows sixth graders who still attend the Hill school to access those co-curricular activities for a fee.

The tuition agreement has a base rate to cover regular education, with supplemental costs for services relating to students’ special educational needs. The base tuition rate is adjusted annually, using either Newfound’s budget changes or the average of the last three years’ inflation rate. That rate also excludes the cost of one-to-one aides, in-district transportation and related fuel charges not in Newfound’s general fund operating budget; in- and out-of-district special education transportation; homeless transportation; student-prescribed special equipment, contracted services, and in-district services; summer school programs; debt service reduced by offsetting revenue; out-of-district tuition; and vocational tuition, all of which are covered by supplemental cost calculations.

A special provision of the contract addresses the possibility of Newfound voters approving building projects and capital improvement plans. Because Hill is not a formal member of the Newfound Area School District, residents have no vote in decisions that could lead to higher tuition rates. To overcome that problem, the agreement requires Newfound to notify Hill four months prior to a vote on a bond issue, allowing Hill to terminate the agreement with a two-year notice.

With three of the seven member towns leaving Newfound at the end of this academic year, the school board is considering altering its grade configuration. Currently, the middle school serves grades six through eight, and the high school serves grades nine through 12. In the tuition agreement, Newfound reserves the right to change that grade configuration, but would give Hill a two-year notice of such a change and the opportunity to renegotiate the agreement if that should occur.

The agreement also allows Hill to appoint an ex-officio school board member with the right to discuss issues before that body, but not cast a vote.

The New Hampshire Board of Education still must approve the tuition contract.

The Pasquaney School District already has negotiated a three-year tuition agreement with Newfound for students in grades seven through 12 but, like Hill, was interested in a memorandum of understanding that would allow sixth graders to participate in middle school-based athletic programs as well as robotics, the Technology Student Association and drama. That also passed unanimously among the four members allowed to cast votes.

In other business, the board approved a $650 middle school health curriculum that emphasizes “environmental wellness, financial wellness, and occupational wellness” — what middle school teacher Eve Bagley described as a skills-based approach to health education.

“We talk about decision-making, analyzing influences, effective communication and goal-setting,” she said, “a really good basis of functional knowledge for wellness that they could take in sixth grade and apply it throughout seventh and eighth.

"It’s about having healthy relationships, having different healthy coping skills, and stuff like that.”

Dead River, the firm that holds the current fuel contract, was the only bidder for a new contract, and its rates are lower than the current agreement. That easily passed, as did a student field trip to Acadia.

Aubrey Freedman of Bridgewater had asked the school board to post the district’s purchasing manifests on the school website to make it easier for members of the public to review expenditures. That met with initial resistance from the school board but, at its Dec. 16 meeting, the board agreed with a recommendation by Superintendent Paul Hoiriis that the information be available on the website. An alternative recommendation was to include the manifest with school board agendas and supporting documents.

Bristol board member Joe Maloney commented, “It seems reasonable to post it all in one place, so that, if, just for the sake of compare and contrast, maybe you wanted to see what we spent last month versus this month or something, you’d be able to do that if it was all in one central location, versus you’d have to go into the board documents and then go back and find the other board documents that could maybe compare, you know. So I think it would be easier if you were out there looking at that information.”

A controversial lactation policy that replaces the traditional term “nursing mothers” with “people with lactation or lactation-related needs” had been returned to the policy committee for review but returned with the new language intact, but some references to “nursing mothers” remained, so it went back to the policy committee for another round of corrections.

The policy itself was not controversial, but the “woke” language recommended by the New Hampshire School Boards Association rankled some school board members and those in the community who found the term unnecessary and objectionable.

Hoiriis pointed out some of the remaining references to “nursing mothers” and commented, “I’m not sure the New Hampshire School Boards Association was very careful when they moved this over, but, again, it’s also been through the policy committee.”

Jen Larochelle of Hebron, who serves on the policy committee, pointed out “the areas where it says ‘nursing mothers’ — I found two of them, but that language is based on state statute, so we can’t change that.”