CHELSEA — The Regional School Unit 12 board of directors has unanimously voted to allow Superintendent Howie Tuttle to ask the Wiscasset School Department if it would like to continue being the “high school of record” for the district’s students.
Tuttle said the relationship between the district and the Wiscasset School Department has worked out well, but as the 10-year mark of the relationship is nearing, Tuttle wanted to check in with the board to see if it was something they still wanted to do.
He said up to this point, the relationship with Wiscasset High School has been “great,” but admitted the bus ride from Palermo to Wiscasset can be long (about 50 minutes without stops). Regardless, he said students who have gone to the high school there have succeeded and he hopes Wiscasset “will want to continue” the relationship between the two districts. Regional School Unit 12 includes Alna, Palermo, Chelsea, Somerville, Westport Island, Whitefield and Windsor.
“I warned the superintendent we would be having this discussion to make sure we still want to have the spot with them,” Tuttle said at the board meeting on Thursday night last week. “So essentially, I need to know if the board wants to continue to have the relationship with them, or explore looking at other high schools.”
In RSU 12, students have the ability to choose the high school they would prefer to go to within the area because the district only offers elementary and middle school. Some students end up going to Hall-Dale High School, Gardiner Area High School, Erskine Academy in South China or Cony High School in Augusta, among other schools through tuition agreements.
Wiscasset Public Schools used to be a part of RSU 12, but per the withdrawal agreement signed in 2013, a school district has to have a high school “of record.”
Tuttle explained the district needs to have a high school of record for various reasons, but the main being if a student goes to a high school “outside the district,” and gets “asked to leave” for poor attendance or behavior issues, there has to be a school for the district to send the student to and in the case of nearly 10 years, it has been Wiscasset High School.
Board of directors member Ryan Carver asked if the district has considered a closer option like Hall-Dale High School or Gardiner as the school on record and Tuttle said at the RSU’s inception, they did consider it.
“No, I have not checked with them recently, we did, eight or nine years ago travel around at the time and have a discussion with Cony, Gardiner and Hall-Dale and the only one that was really interested at the time was Hall-Dale, but that was eight or nine years ago,” Tuttle said. “None of this stops them from going there, this is just the high school ‘of record.'”
Tuttle said he will prepare more information ahead of next month’s board meeting now knowing how the board stands.
The district has talked about forming a committee for exploring high school options and Tuttle said the school board’s vote Thursday night is the “first step of that work.”
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