Bismarck Tribune

By LAUREN DONOVBy LAUREN DONOVAN

The State Department of Public Instruction is withholding state foundation aid money from the Twin Buttes school until it pays money it owes to three surrounding high schools for educating Twin Buttes' high school students last year.

Twin Buttes owes nearly $140,000 in unpaid tuition to Killdeer, Halliday and Golden Valley schools, most of it to Halliday, which charges Twin Buttes $25,000 a year per student, in addition to the state foundation aid it gets for each student.

Twin Buttes doesn't have a high school. Because it doesn't, the district pays other schools their costs to educate the students.

State law says the department has to withhold state money from schools that have unpaid tuition bills when it receives notice of delinquent payments, said DPI spokesman Tom Decker.

Decker said schools that are educating Twin Buttes' high school students will continue to get state foundation aid money for them.

It's the state foundation aid money that goes directly to Twin Buttes for its elementary students that's being withheld, Decker said.

The department has been withholding money from Twin Buttes since November, amounting to about $140,000 so far and will continue to do so until it gets notice that the other schools have been paid.

Twin Buttes Superintendent Chad Dahlen said that in October, the school met with parents of high school students and requested that they start sending the students to Killdeer, where tuition is about $5,000 a year, or Golden Valley, which charges about $10,000. Some already were at those schools and most of those at Halliday did transfer to Killdeer, though two Twin Buttes high school students remain in Halliday. Districts can't mandate which high school their students attend. Killdeer has about 15 high-schoolers from Twin Buttes now.

Decker said the Legislature will be asked to consider a bill that would cap tuition payments based on the state average. That would prevent small districts like Halliday from passing along their extraordinarily high per-student costs to other schools in the form of tuition.

Killdeer school superintendent Gary Wilz said Twin Buttes has been late before, but never went into the next school year without making good on tuition payments.

Decker said the tuition payments are the district's local share above foundation aid and generally come from property tax.

Twin Buttes doesn't have a property tax on reservation land and has made its tuition payments to other schools from its Indian School Education Program funds, which are about 80 percent of its revenue.

Twin Buttes Superintendent Dahlen said, as part of an investigation that led to the indictment of seven school board members and employees for allegedly stealing $665,000 from the school over the past three years, the school was advised not to use federal funds intended for elementary education to pay high school tuition.

Even without the funds stolen and embezzled, Dahlen said the high tuition bills would have caught up to the school eventually, once it was no longer able to use federal funds to pay them.

Twin Buttes has paid off some of its tuition debt and has asked Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., to help change federal regulations so the federal Indian Education money can go toward high school tuition.

In the meantime, Dahlen said the Twin Buttes school district is being extremely frugal and making "every penny count."