Cape & Islands News

Some schools win, some soon lose

Cape School Choice numbers updated

D/Y loss widens, Nauset shows slight gain

By Walter Brooks

The Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District is now losing $1.543 million on students who exercise their school choice opportunities, according to numbers released recently by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.  In Fiscal 2011 DY lost $1.445 million on school choice.

    See Chart with all school choice and
              tuition numbers below.At the same time, Nauset Regional School District leads the Cape on “profitability” of school choice, with net revenue of $1.188 million, up from $1.123 million in Fiscal 2011.

The state’s school choice cash flow models do not include financial impact of students attending charter schools.

Brewster, Eastham, Orleans and Wellfleet– all elementary school districts in the Nauset region – are the only Cape districts that do not accept in-bound school choice students.  Instead, the four districts hemorrhaged some $215,855 to elementary schools in other districts, a total of 33 students in four districts already so under-enrolled that it’s nearly impossible to justify their continued independence.

The troubled Sandwich school district improved their school choice position from a FY2011 loss of $36,688 to a more modest loss of only $15,938 this year.

Provincetown’s loss widened from $55,534 in FY2011 to $76,715 in FY2012.

Over 1,000 Cape Cod students take advantage of school choice.

As Cape Cod Today wrote in our “school competition” article on October 19, 2011, on any field of competition there must be winners and losers.  As the numbers firm up for another year, it’s clear that the Orleans, Eastham, Brewster and Wellfleet elementary districts may soon join Provincetown on the bloody altar of school competition.  It appears likely that Dennis-Yarmouth may be the first regional district that falls to school competition. 

These districts have a year - maybe two - to learn how to market themselves, with the caveat that a school district is, in fact, a business.  Once it’s in free-fall, a failing business can fly to pieces with horrifying speed.