Brewer schools weigh stricter admissions

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BREWER – Slackers need not apply.

Out-of-town students who don’t study, who skip school or who are disciplinary problems may no longer be admitted to Brewer schools under a new policy being considered by the Brewer School Committee.

Committee members will decide Monday whether to implement a nonresident admission policy that has the potential to change the face of Brewer High School and, possibly, other public schools in the state.

Superintendent Daniel Lee has combined Brewer’s policies covering tuition students and nonresident students, adopted 22 years ago, and formed one new policy that would require tuition students interested in entering a Brewer school to apply for admission.

The proposed policy would screen all nonresident students based on academics, attendance and behavior and would deny admission to students who are subject to school discipline or in the juvenile justice system.

“This isn’t meant to create an exclusive high school,” Lee said recently. “It’s meant to get serious students at our high school.”

Brewer’s school board members held the first reading of the policy at their July 10 meeting and will consider it for adoption at their Aug. 7 meeting.

If adopted, the admissions policy for nonresidents would go into effect after Sept. 1 and would be the first of its kind in the state for a public school.

“This is new ground,” Lee said.

The superintendent said that in his research, he found that some private schools had admission policies, but no public school had.

Efforts to reach Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron for comment on Brewer’s proposed policy were unsuccessful.

The policy appears to some area educators to be a way to force other communities without high schools to sign an exclusivity contract – meaning they send all of their students to Brewer. The school department now has no exclusivity contracts with any other district.

Other school leaders worry that it could leave some students who live in outlying communities without a high school to attend.

“The potential down the road – I don’t anticipate that this will be a large number – is that we’ll have students that we won’t be able to be place,” Allen Snell, superintendent of Union 91, which includes the communities of Orrington and Orland, said recently.

Orrington and SAD 63, composed of Holden, Eddington and Clifton, are the two school units that send the highest number of students to Brewer High School, which on April 1 had a total of 890 students enrolled. Of that figure, approximately 260 came from SAD 63, and another 124 or so attended from Orrington.

At the July SAD 63 school board meeting, district leaders expressed concern that Brewer officials had not discussed the proposed policy with them, especially since the policy could drastically affect their students’ futures.

SAD 63 Chairwoman Patricia Sirois said Monday that she has received a copy of the policy and a letter of explanation from Lee, but declined to comment because she wanted to discuss the issue with Superintendent Louise Regan, who was out of town.

At the school board meeting, however, Sirois commented that she “gasped” when she learned about the policy.

Brewer has the right to enforce the new policy with Union 91, “because we don’t have a contract with them,” Snell said.

Student qualifications

The Brewer School Department’s legal counsel determined earlier this year that without exclusive contracts with communities and school districts that send students to the city, the school department legally could screen students. In addition to filling out an application, nonresident students also would have to submit two years of academic, attendance and discipline records as part of the process.

“There are three components,” Lee said. “The first component is discipline – do students behave themselves. The second [component] is academics, and the third is do they attend school regularly.”

Applying students also will need a recommendation from the principal or superintendent, which includes a statement as to “whether the students made an overall contribution or detracted from their educational environment during the previous school year,” the planned policy reads.

Eventually, the goal is to cap the number of students at Brewer High School in an effort to control budget figures, which fluctuate yearly based on the number of sending students, Lee said.

Bangor High School does have a nonresident policy, but the policy does not screen students, Bangor Superintendent Robert Ervin said recently.

“It does not limit students according to any particular characteristic, but it does say we can take only so many tuition students,” he said, adding later: “It’s first come, first served. We fill as far as we can before we meet the number of tuition students we can take, and then we have a waiting list.

“We do not have an application process, we have a registration process,” Ervin said.

Bangor starts to form a waiting list for nonresident students each spring and now has a waiting list for this fall.

Ervin said the philosophy behind Brewer’s policy is interesting, but it’s not anything he would ever present to the Bangor school board. He also stressed concern for students who don’t make the cut.

“If Brewer was to exclude a student in the middle of July, let’s say, they would likely be put on a waiting list” to attend school in Bangor, he said.

John Bapst Memorial High School, a private school in Bangor, does have an admission policy, but does not have specific wording to limit its selections, including for students with discipline or absentee problems, Head of School Landis Green said recently.

“We have no existing policy that says those students will not be considered for admission,” he said. “We would consider any student that applies.

“I think that we have to acknowledge that kids make mistakes,” Green said later. “I recognize that a mistake a child has made doesn’t define that child.”

John Bapst typically has students from 50 communities. The school does not have a waiting list or exclusive contracts with any towns.

“The common denominator of our kids is they want to go to college,” Green said.

Another added component of the new policy proposed in Brewer is transportation. In Orrington and SAD 63, students have a choice as to what school to attend because their hometowns do not have a high school, but the sending schools provide student transportation to only two high schools.

“In Orrington, you have a conditional choice [because] we offer transportation to two schools – Brewer and John Bapst,” Snell said. “You can go to Orono High School or Old Town … but we don’t provide transportation.”

After Brewer made its announcement about the possible admission policy, Old Town High School leaders, following Brewer’s lead, decided to consider a similar policy, Lee said.

Efforts made this past week to reach Old Town Superintendent David Walker for comment were unsuccessful.

The proposed Brewer admission policy also has provisions for special education students that coordinate with the student’s pupil evaluation team.

“It’s not meant to keep all students out,” Lee said. “We certainly need students from SAD 63 and Orrington. They’re great kids.”

If the enrollment policy is adopted, school leaders will begin the process to determine how large a student population Brewer High School should have and a student population cap, Lee said.

The admission policy is a different way of approaching long-term planning to bring the school budget into balance, Lee said.

“We can’t continue to operate a school for them,” he said, referring to nonresident students. “We operate for Brewer. My responsibility is for the students of Brewer. The responsibility of sending students is with their superintendent.”