Two students who left Cobleskill-Richmondville through no fault of their own are doing well in their new schools.
Christian Arvidson’s daughter and Crystal Kennedy’s son enjoy their new schools––Middleburgh and Jefferson, respectively.
The two families live on Rossman Valley Road in Summit and believed they lived in the C-R district.
C-R officials believed they lived in the district, too, until the error was discovered at the beginning of last school year. Through a bus-routing mistake, the students had been attending C-R when they should have been going to Middleburgh.
The two mothers pushed to have their kids continue at C-R, but the district agreed to only a year’s grace so that the families had time to find a new school. After that, the families would have had to pay non-resident tuition, $4,698 per year.
The two students finished the 2016-17 year at Ryder School. Now, they’re relocated and happy.
“Middleburgh has been great,” Ms. Arvidson said. “They called to see if we were doing well,” and Middleburgh helped with the transition.
She received no similar treatment from C-R. On her daughter’s final report card in June, a message welcomed her to Radez School, where she would have gone for third grade.
“This was annoying,” Ms. Arvidson said of the message. “I wasn’t impressed with how Cobleskill handled it all.”
Ms. Kennedy chose Jefferson because of its good reputation and because her son would have had a long ride on a Middleburgh school bus.
Now, she drives the boy to JCS and picks him up when a bus drops him off at Meade Road on Route 10.
“So far, so good,” Ms. Kennedy said of her second-grader. “He’s adjusted well, he knows a few kids in his class and he likes his teacher a lot.”
Like Ms. Arvidson, Ms. Kennedy believed C-R mishandled the situation. The school board could have altered what she saw as an administrative decision and allowed the two kids to stay at C-R.
“I wanted them to be fair, and they didn’t even vote,” Ms. Kennedy said. “It left a bad taste in my mouth. I was annoyed.”
There was some sentiment among C-R officials to allow the two students to stay without tuition. However, Superintendent Carl Mummenthey and others felt that waiving tuition for the rest of the students’ time at C-R would be too expensive for taxpayers to bear.