By Rod Hansen
Staff Writer

An unexpected surge in the housing market has caused Dunbarton to send more students than expected to school in neighboring Goffstown under a tuition agreement, a school board member said.

However, reduced demands for special education services means the tuition costs will not hurt the school district’s bottom line, said Dunbarton School Board Vice Chairman John Herlihy.

“There’s a building boom going on right now,” Herlihy said. “Of the 50 households that moved in before the 2005-06 school year, about half of them had middle school and high school students” requiring education in Goffstown.

Because Dunbarton has no middle school or high school of its own, it sends students in those age groups to Mountain View Middle School in Goffstown and Goffstown High School.

According to Goffstown School District enrollment figures, there are currently 61 Dunbarton students enrolled in Mountain View Middle School and 122 Dunbarton students in Goffstown High School.

The Goffstown School District currently charges Dunbarton $8,494 per middle school student and $7,883 per high school student, said Ray Labore, business administrator for SAU 19, the administrative unit covering Goffstown, Dunbarton and New Boston.

Herlihy said the Dunbarton School Board starts off with an estimated number of students when the board does its budget, but that number can go up and down depending on families leaving or moving into town.

He said the school board arrives at its estimates by determining how many Dunbarton Elementary School sixth-graders will be going off to the seventh grade at Mountain View Middle School, as well as how many students will be entering and leaving Goffstown High School. However, he said families taking up residence in Dunbarton are not required to tell the school district how many school-aged children they have, so surges in growth can cause tuition spending to increase.

Because the expected number of special needs students did not enter the school system this year, Herlihy said Dunbarton can use money allotted for that purpose to correct the deficiencies in tuition.

“Thank God this situation corrected itself; otherwise, we would have had to find other money in the budget,” Herlihy said.