Members of the North Kingstown School Community,

I hope you have found time to relax and rejuvenate with your families this summer.

We have finalized our bell times, and there will be changes from last year. Because of the budgetary decrease of two busses this spring, we are forced to start the high school 10 minutes earlier and start all elementary schools 10 minutes later. Middle school times will remain the same. This isn’t what I would prefer to do, but our tight budget issues don’t give us many options (and all of them are bad ones).

I can’t stress enough to our community the significance of the funding discussions we have each spring. I need our community to understand that with the funding issues we are facing, we will have to put up with this inconvenience and others as well. As you may recall, our budget reductions included cuts to many areas including cuts to staff, sports and music funding, funds to maintain our buildings in a timely manner, salary and benefits to our employees, and bus transportation. Obviously, as September approaches, we are starting to feel the impact of these cuts.

As always, I want you to know that we are committed to keeping the quality of our educational program as high as it has ever been, even with these reductions, and we plan to have a great year.

Our new bell times are here. I hope you can understand our predicament.

Sincerely,

Phil Auger, Ph.D.
Superintendent of North Kingstown Public Schools

Download a start time schedule