Over the summer, 20 more students living in Springs enrolled at East Hampton High School, which means that the Springs School District may be called upon to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more on tuition than it anticipated.
When preparing the district's 2022-23 budget, officials planned for 357 high school students — and got 377. At a cost of about $24,000 per general-education student, that could mean at least $480,000 more over the course of the school year.
The current number, 377, includes special-education enrollment; tuition rates and related services for this student classification cost more. (A separate example of this, coming from the Wainscott and Sag Harbor districts, is reported elsewhere in this issue.)
Debra Winter, the Springs superintendent, noted during Tuesday's school board meeting that the enrollment could still change — in either direction, up or down — before school starts on Sept. 6. "I don't want us to panic," she said. "We still don't know how many high school students have disenrolled or moved." Requests to transfer school records, she pointed out, "don't come to us, they come to the high school."
After Tuesday's meeting, Ms. Winter said that once the school year starts, the district will assign a staff member, along with a security guard, to do residence checks. (Last year's check found just one student living outside the district.)
Springs would have to draw from a surplus account, find expenses to cut, or approve transfers from elsewhere in the budget, to offset any extra tuition costs.
An example of exactly that was cited earlier at Tuesday's meeting: $291,780 was pulled from unused special education funds and other budget lines to cover the rest of last year's general education tuition to East Hampton. The school board also approved $10,140 in budget transfers to cover shortfalls for Board of Cooperative Educational Service programs. Another $64,590 was moved between accounts "to cover various shortages," according to records on file in Board Docs, the district's school board database.
Tuition "keeps me up at night," Ms. Winter commented after the meeting.
The district now has 1,096 students from prekindergarten through 12th grade, an increase of 76 over last year across all of the grades. The school, which goes up to eighth grade, expects 695 children in its classrooms on Sept. 6, an increase of 13 over last year.
Kindergarten enrollment is down significantly over prior years, to 56 children, meaning that grade will have only three classrooms, instead of four, like most others. It also meant that when a kindergarten teacher resigned recently, the administration elected not to replace her — which, in view of the budget concerns, saved another teacher from being laid off, Ms. Winter said.
The largest class at Springs is expected to be the eighth grade, with 82 students. Class sizes are capped at 25, according to school board policy, and the superintendent confirmed that each grade has complied with that rule so far this year.
In other Springs School news, the district has signed an agreement with the East Hampton School District to buy school lunches for students on the free and reduced-price lunch program. The minimum number of lunches daily is 10, and the cost per meal to Springs is $3.89, including tax. Timothy Frazier, vice president of the Springs School Board, voted yes, but questioned the tax and directed the administration to double-check.
Ms. Winter announced that work on the new kindergarten playground has begun and the roof replacement is nearly complete.
Also at the meeting, the board recognized Kristi Hood, longtime proprietor of the recently shuttered Springs General Store, for her significant contributions in support of the school over the years. "She has helped families out in all kinds of ways we don't even know about," Mr. Frazier said. "It is a very sad day for our community, but at the same time, I know she's on to things she wants to pursue."