Springs, Gansett Approve Contracts

School boards in Springs and Amagansett on Tuesday approved a new five-year tuition contract with the East Hampton School District, while the Montauk School District chose not to publicly discuss the matter during its own meeting.

As it did previously, East Hampton is offering a 5-percent discount to school districts that agree to exclusively send their students there after they graduate from their home districts. The base tuition rate will see a decrease of about $310, to $25,945.

As the Springs School District faces potentially severe cuts to make a budget increase fit within the constraints of the tax levy cap, its bottom line will at least get a bit of relief when it comes to high school tuition costs thanks to the discount.

Thomas Primiano, the Springs district treasurer, explained that the 5-percent discount means tuition will be $24,648 per student in the regular education program next year and $68,868 per special education student.

The school district expects to send 297 students to East Hampton next year, 9 of whom require special education services. Based on that number, under the new agreement, Springs expects to pay just over $7.7 million in tuition next year. Without the exclusivity agreement, the cost would have been $409,800 more.

Still, total tuition payments will increase over this year’s projected payments. The 2014-15 budget anticipated sending 258 regular education students and 7 special education students to East Hampton, for a total of nearly $6.87 million in tuition.

In the Amagansett School District, tuition to East Hampton is approximately 25 percent of the school budget, which currently stands at just over $10 million.

“We are very pleased that we are able to come to this agreement with East Hampton,” the Amagansett superintendent, Eleanor Tritt, said yesterday. “Over the five-year period, it gives stability and predictability in our tuition rates.”

She said approximately 90 current students from Amagansett are slated to attend school in East Hampton next year, though she expects that number to fluctuate.

Following their school boards’ approval of the tuition rate on Tuesday, voters in Springs and Amagansett will have the chance to vote on it in May; the tuition contracts will appear as separate propositions on each district’s ballots.

Asked for further details on the contract, a school representative in East Hampton declined to provide any, saying “this is an attorney-client privileged matter at this time.”

According to its meeting agenda, the Montauk School Board was set to publicly discuss the tuition rate on Tuesday, but instead went into executive session. In an email on Tuesday night, Montauk’s superintendent, Jack Perna, said, “It is a contract and we are negotiatingterms. . . . Agreement still pending at this time.”

The Wainscott School District has not yet voted to accept the contract. Its superintendent, Stuart Rachlin, said yesterday the school is hoping to be able to approve a one-year agreement with East Hampton, rather than a five-year one.

“For us, the issue is the uncertainty of the construction of affordable housing and the potential impact of the additional tuition on our taxpayers,” Mr. Rachlin said in an email, referring to a controversial proposal to build 48 rental units in the district. “We have embarked on a multiyear plan of closely examining our budgets, tax levies, and fund balance. We feel that the one-year contract is faithful to our plan and to the Wainscott community.”

The tuition agreement was not on Sagaponack’s School Board agenda at its March 9 meeting, and the school district was not able to provide any information by press time.

Tuition for East Hampton’s sending districts is based on what is known as the Seneca Falls formula, which sets separate rates for kindergarten through 6th grade and for 7th through 12th grades, and for special education students in kindergarten through 6th and 7th through 12th.

With Reporting by Janis Hewitt

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Correction: In its original print and online version, this article stated that the base tuition that East Hampton charges to its sending districts will increase from this year to next. In fact, the base tuition will decrease by $310.