As the cost to attend George Stevens Academy goes up, the Blue Hill Peninsula towns that send their students to the private high school have formed a new committee that will give them a chance to chime in as the academy drafts its budget each year.
This spring, voters in Blue Hill, Brooklin, Brooksville, Sedgwick, Penobscot, Surry and Castine all approved a tuition hike of $1,700 per student after school officials said the state-set tuition rate is below the actual cost to educate students.
But with the heftier price tag, towns have demanded more transparency. With the school’s cooperation, they have formed a review committee to work with the Blue Hill-based school on its annual budget.
“The mission is to bring representation to the money that is going in from the taxpayers,” said James Goodman, a Penobscot school board member and one of the people who helped create the committee.
Though it’s overseen by a private board of trustees, George Stevens Academy functions as the public high school for towns on the Blue Hill Peninsula. Town-paid tuition accounts for about 80 percent of the academy’s budget. But because the school is an independent nonprofit, the towns are not directly involved in the budgeting process.
The academy raised the idea of supplemental tuition in 2019 and the towns approved an additional $1,000 per student last year. When the academy came back this year to ask for $1,700 per student, some municipal officials felt they had the right to know more about the school’s financial situation.
“I, as a parent and a taxpayer, have concerns about the financial viability of it,” said Sean Dooley, a Blue Hill Select Board member and the chairman of the new budget review committee. “I think the towns want transparency.”
The school said it needed the extra money because it costs about $14,000 to educate each student, but it only gets about $12,000 through a state-set tuition rate. In the past, George Stevens was able to make up the difference through its international boarding student program, which charged between $40,000 and $50,000 a student.
But, according to school officials, the academy has seen the number of boarding students, many from China, drop dramatically in recent years due to the pandemic, rising diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and China, and increased competition from other schools for international students.
The extra $1,700 per student would set the school on a sustainable financial footing and prevent any major operating changes, academy head Tim Seeley previously told the Bangor Daily News.
Seeley did not immediately return a request for comment Monday.
Even with the rate hike, the academy is still cheaper than starting a public school and the average cost per student for neighboring high schools are all higher than George Stevens.
The new committee has been approved by school officials and had its first meeting last month. While its formation provides an avenue for towns to formally provide input, the committee is only advisory and budget decisions will still fall to the school trustees.
Dooley hoped that the committee and school officials could get along and work to better both the school and the peninsula.
“Hopefully there will be some kind of net positive effect for the towns,” he said.
