RIPLEY - With declining enrollment and other factors impacting the Ripley Central School District, school officials have decided to look at every option.
They have tried merging with neighboring Westfield Academy and Central School, only to have the idea voted down by Westfield residents.
So, in an effort to provide Ripley students with the best educational opportunities available, school officials asked residents if they should move forward with tuitioning high school students to neighboring districts. Residents said "no," voting down the proposition by a vote of 161 to 131 during the budget vote.
"The feeling of the board on it is we have an obligation to look at these options for our community, and all we are doing is looking to take our district into the direction our community wants to go in," said Bob Bentley, Board of Education president. "If it is not tuitioning, it is not tuitioning."
If residents had approved the tuitioning measure, school officials would have investigated whether the move would make educational and financial sense.
A committee would have examined tuition rates at neighboring districts Westfield, Sherman, Chautauqua Lake, Brocton, and North East, Pa. and to decided which districts to open up to students and parents.
The tuition vote aimed to indicate if there was enough community support in the concept, said John Hogan, interim superintendent. "It was an option the school board wanted to explore without doing a full blown study," he said.
However, even with the negative tuition vote, Hogan was still pleased with the way things went for the district. "I want to thank the Ripley community for supporting the budget and the program which is currently in place for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade kids and allowing us to purchase a bus," he said.
But now, Hogan said school officials will examine data collected from an exit poll collected during the budget vote and try to figure out where to go next. "What the board now needs to do is review all of the data that was collected and chart some kind of course for the future of this school district," he said.
Bentley said the board plans to discuss its findings from the exit poll at an upcoming meeting. "I think we approached this with let?s get a feel for the community," Bentley said of the tuition vote. "I believe Ripley just doesn't believe tuition is what's right for us right now. Ripley gave us their opinion of it."
However, Bentley stressed the "no" vote wouldn?t mean school officials would stop looking out for the students' best interests, including merger, an idea which Bentley has said in the past still isn't dead. "We have an obligation with declining enrollment to make that change," he said. "It's just a matter of what that change will be to satisfy the Ripley community. Our obligation is to always continue to look at our options. We are looking for something better and we'll continue to look for something better."