Brewer to charge for tuition students’ special ed

BREWER – School districts have been able to charge tuition students for special education services above and beyond regular schooling for years, but to maintain “good-neighbor relations,” Brewer has not charged sending districts for those costs.

That philosophy changed on Monday when the Brewer School Committee voted to go forward with charging for those special education services it delivers to out-of-town tuition students.

“It’s an economic necessity at this point,” Lester Young, Brewer school business manager, said Tuesday.

The move, which is expected to bring in more than $260,000, is needed to offset a significant decrease in how much the state is paying per pupil, Superintendent Daniel Lee said Tuesday.

“We could have been doing this for quite some time,” he said. “It’s kind of like Brewer has subsidized these special education costs over those years.

“Those districts are receiving additional funding for these students [from the state],” Lee added. “They also receive federal entitlement money for special education costs. I believe they have the money.”

The fact that Brewer is receiving $380 less per pupil for secondary students for 2005-06, a decision announced by the Maine Department of Education on Dec. 9, is the reason behind the change, Lee said.

A total of 14 communities or school administrative districts send high school students to Brewer. The most come from SAD 63, composed of Holden, Eddington and Clifton, which sends 232 students; 66 of them receive special education services.

Of the high school’s 931 students, 475 students or approximately 51 percent are from sending districts. A total of 129 tuition students get special ed services.

The change was not unexpected by one other sending school district. Orrington sends 124 high school students, 26 of which receive special ed.

“I anticipated this would be happening,” Orrington Superintendent Allan Snell said Tuesday. “Orrington is receiving an additional amount for the special education students. I knew it was coming, in that we had been talking about it when I was the super in Brewer.”

Bucksport High School, another school that takes Orrington students, also is starting to charge for special education costs, Snell pointed out.

“Old Town and Orono have been doing it for years,” he said. “This is happening in many places. It’s being driven by the new EPS [Essential Programs and Services] formula. Under ESP, each town receives an additional EPS amount for each special education student.”

The new charges in Brewer will be retroactive to the beginning of the school year, Lee said.

“We’re going to back-bill to the first of the year for special education services that we’ve provided,” he said.

He said, for example, that a tuition student assigned to the resource room for one hour a day, at a cost of $6.21, for five days a week, would generate a cost to the sending district of an additional $1,105 during the course of a year.

Rough preliminary estimates, provided by Lee, project that by the end of the year, SAD 63 (Holden, Eddington, Clifton) will have accumulated $134,410 in extra charges for services provided. It’s estimated that Orrington could to be charged $50,412; Dedham, $44,557; and $27,592 in Glenburn. Lee’s estimates are based on the number of students now enrolled in special education programs.

For 2005-06, Brewer is getting $6,499.53 per student from the state, down from $6,879.56 last year. The state figure, which does not exclude expenses such as transportation, special education, vocational education and adult education, is based on last year’s costs divided by student population and is set by the DOE every December. The state average for 2005-06 was set at $7,205.

“Our tuition rate is going down 51/2 percent, and the state average went up 4.7 percent, so there is a disparity there of almost 10 percent,” Lee said.

Both Old Town and Brewer are in the same boat, because both communities have similar percentages of sending students, Lee said. The big difference is that Old Town began charging for special education services provided years ago.

That is one reason “we’ve been exploring this for a few years,” Young said.

“If it was only one or two students, we wouldn’t bother, but with half of the high school [paying tuition], you have to do that,” Lee said.

The decision may spur outlying communities to look at consolidation, or the possibility of signing an exclusive contract with Brewer, which would be mutually beneficial, he said.

In a memo to the school committee, Lee stated that Brewer, in 2007, might ask for a portion or all of the funds that the sending school districts receive for technology education and educational assessments.

“It’s our intent to look for the [technology and assessment] funds in the future,” Lee said. “It’s suppose to follow the student.”