To the editor:
In Massachusetts, every municipality must have a designated school district to educate its children for every child regardless of grade. Some, like Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and West Stockbridge, have built and funded schools to educate their children. Others have not. Those towns without their own schools must “tuition in” their children. With declining enrollment, there is currently intense price competition between receiving districts. Sending towns have negotiated a per-child tuition rate that is roughly one third the cost to the receiving district to educate each child. This is incredibly unfair and, it turns out, may be easy to fix.
Today, I am proposing an intermunicipal agreement between school districts with high schools in Berkshire County. This agreement would set a binding annual tuition fee for tuition-in students not less than the fully burdened per-student cost paid for via the taxes of their district member towns.
Sending towns would be free to choose the district with whom they contract based on location, curriculum, quality, whatever. The binding agreement between receiving districts would eliminate the price competition between districts. The agreement would prevent sending towns from gaming these districts, in effect eliminating the race to the bottom in terms of tuition rates that districts with physical schools now face.
This would function like a cartel, an anti-competitive form of price fixing. I asked Stockbridge town counsel if there was any prohibition in state law that would prevent such an arrangement. Is there a law that would prevent the districts from jointly setting a tuition price per student? Put another way, are municipalities exempt from antitrust/anti-competitive laws that apply to private companies? It turns out, as far as we can tell, districts are not subject to anti-competitive limitations.
This was the response from Donna Brewer of Harrington Heep, Stockbridge’s town counsel:
Hi Patrick, you asked whether towns/regional school districts can enter into intermunicipal agreements to set the tuition cost for students from towns with small populations who are educated in regional school districts. I presume that you are referring to the arrangement under G.L. c. 71, § 6, where towns with less than five hundred families do not have to have a high school and can ‘tuition out’ their high school students instead. DESE can also exempt towns from the requirement to maintain elementary and middle schools. G.L. c. 71, § 1.
I have been unable to find anything in statute, case law or other opinion or guidance stating how tuition must be set in either of these instances, except that it is done by agreement of the parties. I also have found nothing prohibiting an IMA among towns/regional school districts to prevent others from ‘tuition shopping.’ …[T]he agreement would be between the educational entities, usually the regional school district.
You may be interested in this Harvard/Devens agreement for one arrangement.
Note, however, that DESE does need to “approve the high schools which may be attended by such pupils.” I expect that DESE would want to see any such agreement, and I have not seen anything indicating how they would view such an intermunicipal agreement.
It is incredibly unfair to BHRSD taxpayers, and for that matter students, to face high taxes, steep budget cuts, curriculum cuts, and uncertainty regarding the new high school while other towns educate their students in our system for roughly a third the cost to our taxpayers.
All Berkshire County districts with high schools accept tuition-in students as far as I know. This only works if there is an agreement between all districts to participate in a tuition-setting arrangement. To begin work, I call upon the superintendents of BHRSD, SBRSD, Lenox, and Lee to begin negotiations immediately to develop such an intermunicipal agreement. As an example, were such an agreement in place right now, BHRSD would have generated an additional $1.5 million in the current budget from tuition towns, forestalling the kind of severe budget cuts we have read about recently in the paper.
Thank you.
Patrick White
Member of the Stockbridge Select Board
Stockbridge
Click here to read The Berkshire Edge’s policy for submitting Letters to the Editor.
