Norwich - As the smaller partner towns that send students to Norwich Free Academy appear ready to sign new contracts with the academy, Norwich public school officials said Monday they are at an impasse in negotiations on a new contract governing NFA's position as the city's designated high school.

The contract has expired, and the two parties have been operating on a year-to-year extension.

In a strongly worded letter sent to NFA attorney Nicholas Grello Jr. last week, the board's attorney, Saranne P. Murray, said she has received no response to a request "to negotiate in good faith" except an email saying the attorney would forward the request to NFA for review.

"In the more than two months that have passed, there was never any substantive response from you to the proposed contract I sent, and no other representative of NFA made any effort to discuss the contract with the board or any representative of the board," Murray wrote in the Feb. 27 letter discussed Monday by the Board of Education Budget Expenditure Committee.

Murray continued that NFA sent a contract to Superintendent Abby Dolliver Feb. 23 with a request that she and board Chairwoman Yvette Jacaruso schedule a time to sign it.

Dolliver said Monday she doesn't plan to sign that proposed contract and said it does not address several concerns Norwich public school officials had raised. Those issues include a more timely calculation of enrollment projections for both regular and special education.

Last summer, Norwich and the seven other NFA partner towns formed a coalition to discuss the future contract with NFA and appointed Lisbon Board of Education Chairman Randy Baah as the spokesman for the group. The group reached an agreement with the academy recently.

Murray, however, wrote in the letter that Jacaruso made it clear during those meetings that Baah "did not have the authority to make any commitment on the Board's part."

In a statement released Monday night, NFA Board of Trustees Chairman Theodore Phillips said the board is "disappointed and perplexed" by the public school board's withdrawal in December from the consortium that Norwich helped create last summer.

"Norwich Public Schools withdrew from the consortium right before the meeting that Mr. Baah called to review the final changes to the contract that everyone, including (Norwich Public Schools), had since last May," Phillips wrote in an email statement. "Norwich never directly responded to that contract until after the Master Agreement was finalized, and even then it failed to respond, but instead sent its own contract."

The NFA Board of Trustees approved its 2015-16 $34.4 million budget Feb.12 with a 2.5 percent tuition increase. A $1.2 million subsidy from the NFA Foundation prevented a nearly 6 percent tuition increase, NFA officials said at the time.

Norwich sends 1,253 regular education and nearly 300 special education students to NFA. Norwich receives a $100 per student discount on tuition as the host town that provides emergency services and other city services to the academy, an amount that hasn't changed in many years.

The Norwich total tuition bill next year is projected at $21.8 million, a $534,305 increase, school Business Administrator Athena Nagel said.

In addition, the public school budget contains $2 million in non-tuition costs to NFA, including providing 13 special education support staff to serve Norwich students. The non-tuition costs are increasing by $400,000, bringing the total NFA-related increase to more than $900,000.

The total draft 2015-16 public school budget is $75.8 million, a 6 percent increase of more than $4.3 million, according to the latest estimates provided at the budget expenditure meeting.

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