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“In isolation, it’s a routine process, we do it by rote,” said Lyme School Board Chair Elizabeth Glenshaw. “But in the bigger context, it’s about ensuring the continued access to public education to all, regardless of circumstances.”
The relationship between the schools is so ingrained that even though the most recent agreement expired in June 2016, “it’s continued in spirit since then,” said Lyme School Principal Jeff Valence. It was also virtually identical to the previous agreement, which lasted from 2007 to 2012, and probably to the one before that, too, he said.
A task force is now working on a new agreement that will also closely resemble its predecessors, but with some minor revisions that are meant to respond to recent changes in state law since the previous agreement went into effect in July 2013.
Though these adjustments may be small on the language level, they stem from legislative changes that are anything but that, said Glenshaw, citing the Act 46 school consolidation law in Vermont and Senate Bill 8 in New Hampshire, which allows schools to tuition students to private schools, not just public ones, for grade levels not offered in the students’ hometowns.
While these legislative changes don’t directly threaten the Thetford-Lyme partnership, they have contributed to what Glenshaw called a “culture of uncertainty” in the Twin States with regard to public education. She hopes the new partnership agreement will dispel some of this uncertainty by clarifying, in the language of current state laws, the nature of the relationship between the two communities.
In other words, the task force is making changes to the agreement to ensure it stays the same.
Aside from guaranteeing Lyme students admission to Thetford Academy, the partnership agreement spells out other terms of collaboration between the two school communities. For example, there must be one Lyme representative on Thetford Academy’s Board of Trustees — that’s currently Karl Furstenberg — and faculty members at both schools are expected to communicate regularly about curriculum and student needs.
“The relationship we’ve built together over the years … has brought something really special to the educational landscape here,” Valence said. “The fact that families can choose to send their kids to an independent academy, while still upholding the tenets of public education, is very important to us.”
And the relationship is a long-standing one. Even before the two schools got this agreement in writing, they enjoyed an unofficial partnership whose origins precede the memories of many school officials.
“There’s lots of people in town here in Lyme who went to Thetford Academy when they were kids, and now their kids are going,” said Furstenberg, who was a longtime dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth College. “So it goes back at least two generations.”
The written agreement goes back to at least 1996, when Thetford Academy enacted a new admissions policy in an effort to manage its swelling enrollment numbers. Under this policy, Thetford Academy guarantees admission only to students from towns that designate Thetford Academy as their high school — those towns were, and are, Thetford and Strafford, whose elementary schools go up to sixth and eighth grades respectively — or towns who have struck official partnership agreements with the academy. Prospective students from all other towns, except Lyme, must submit an application.
Valence estimated that, on average, about 25 percent of Lyme students choose to attend Thetford Academy for high school each year. Another 25 percent opt for St. Johnsbury Academy, with the largest chunk of Lyme students — about half — choosing to go to Hanover High School; both of these schools have partnership agreements with Lyme that are similar to the one with Thetford Academy. A much smaller number of Lyme students also choose to go to Lebanon High School, Hartford High School or Rivendell Academy in Orford.
In the 2016-2017 school year, tuition was just under $18,000 to Thetford Academy, $19,275 to Hanover High School and $16,350 to St. Johnsbury Academy.
Thetford Academy is technically private — it’s governed by a Board of Trustees, not an elected school board like at public schools — but because of its open enrollment to students from Thetford, Strafford and Lyme, Thetford Academy’s Head of School Bill Bugg described the school as “public in nature.”
Now, with Senate Bill 8, families in towns with school choice may send their students to private schools in New Hampshire by opening an education savings account, which receives around $3,500 of state funding, or 90 percent of the amount of per-pupil funding that would otherwise go toward public school districts.
Glenshaw pointed out that some people see the passage of Senate Bill 8 as a threat to public education in New Hampshire, since it means rerouting money away from public schools that may already be underfunded and struggling with low enrollment, and toward private schools that may give preferential treatment to students who come from more privileged backgrounds.
She stressed that it’s too early to predict how the bill will play out, but this changing landscape has raised the stakes of preserving the public nature of the Thetford Academy-Lyme partnership agreement. This is part of why the details of the contract have taken longer to hammer out than in previous years, and why the task force does not have a set date for finalizing the contract.
“We want to make our language stronger,” Glenshaw said, “because the state’s language is no longer as strong as it has been historically.”
Historically, about two-thirds of the Academy’s students have been Thetford residents, with the rest hailing from a dozen or so other towns in the area, Bugg said. Last year, 19 of Thetford’s 338 students were from Lyme. This year, Thetford Academy has 320 students, 20 of whom are from Lyme.
He attributed this enrollment drop to an unusually large senior class last year, and added that this year’s student population is the second-highest Thetford Academy has had in nine years. The school did overestimate its enrollment for this year by five students, which contributed to a roughly $300,000 deficit. The school has a budget of $7.1 million for this year.
The school also received no new international applicants, which Furstenberg suggested might be related to the difficulty of crossing United States borders in the current political climate, but said only time would tell whether this decrease is an anomaly or a trend.
Bugg said the school was unlikely to change its recruitment strategies in Lyme or elsewhere in an attempt to make up for lost tuition dollars, since the school has run a surplus every year for the last four years; he also said he would be interested in exploring partnership agreements with other Upper Valley schools, should those schools express interest. The academy has seen a recent uptick in Hartland applicants, with 16 students from the town currently enrolled, and 27 students from Waits River now go to Thetford Academy, the same number of students who attend from Strafford, where Thetford Academy is the designated high school.
But the academy’s relationship with Lyme is unique, Bugg said, in that it “goes real deep in the past,” which is why the partnership agreement exists with Lyme and not with other towns.
“(The agreement) just naturally evolved from the partnership that already existed between our two communities,” Bugg said.
Valence, too, characterized the relationship as a symbiotic one.
“They’ve served the Lyme community for a long, long time,” he said. “And they certainly can’t lose our (tuition) money. … Education is complex, but we’ve come to rely on each other in many ways. And that’s a good thing.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.