St. Regis Falls Central School District (Photo provided —Amy Feiereisel/NCPR)

Last year, the St. Regis Falls Central School District had around three dozen instructional teaching staff. About two-thirds of those teachers are not returning for this upcoming school year.

A couple retired and some teacher aide positions were eliminated, but 18 teachers chose to take jobs in other districts.

That proportion of teachers leaving a single school district from one school year to the next is virtually unheard of in the North Country. It’s had a big impact on the school and the community, and it has people asking: what happened here? And how will the school open in September?

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“A mainstay of the community”

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The St. Regis Falls Central School District serves just over 200 kids in one K-12 building. The school is the largest employer in town, and many say it’s also the heart of the community. There are no movie theaters or large restaurants in town.

The school is the central gathering place, said LaDonna King, a retired teacher who worked in the St. Regis Falls District for 28 years.

“St. Regis Falls Central School has always been a mainstay of the community,” said King said, noting that sports games, plays, concerts and Senior Carnival are all well-attended events.

“People are there to support their kids. They yell out to their kids on the stage. They are very proud of the things that go on,” she said.

She said it’s been common for the district to hire teachers who were themselves students there. “We have teachers who came up through the St. Regis Falls School system, and their children are in there now. So you’ve got grandparents and parents and children,” King said.

So for longtime and tenured teachers to leave the district for jobs in other ones, “I think that has been a shocker to us all, truthfully,” she said.

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An exodus of teachers

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King has been keeping her own list of departing teachers, and by her count, there were four retirements (two of which were second retirements), four eliminated positions (three teacher assistants and a technology position), and 18 teachers or instructional staff who have chosen to take positions in other districts like Malone, Massena, Chateaugay, Brasher Falls, Parishville and Salmon River. NCPR confirmed that with school numbers and individuals.

Jamie LeRoux, one of the teachers who left, said it was an agonizing decision. “When I say I was going down with the ship, I really was,” she said. “But it got to the point where I couldn’t. And I had to jump.”

LeRoux was tenured and had been teaching at St. Regis Falls for 18 years. The district was her life.

“My children go to school there. I went to school there. My parents went to school there,” LeRoux said. “I still live two miles from the building. It was literally the hardest decision I ever, ever had to make.”

LaDonna King said the departures are devastating for the St. Regis Falls community, and it has been painful to watch and feel powerless.

“This is not only not normal, this is heartbreaking. This is watching the death of a school right here. That’s how I feel about it,” King said.

“It was a family that was there,” she said of the school’s teachers. “We worked together through thick and thin. Whatever happened, we helped each other get through it. This has been the first time that I have ever seen that they were not able to do that anymore.”

King retired a few years ago and has been in touch with many of the teachers who left. She said they told her the school environment “was so discouraging and demoralizing to the people working there that they could not concentrate on their teaching … to the point that they felt that they had to go somewhere else.”

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Is the school opening in September?

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What King and many others were most concerned about was whether the school would be able to open this fall. Current Superintendent Nicole Eschler, who started in January 2023, said it absolutely will.

“I feel very confident we will open,” Eschler said. She said the district had hired eight teachers by mid-July. It’s also hired a K-12 principal.

Eschler said they were almost fully staffed on the Pre-K to 8th grade level. In the high school, she said “we [still] need the same positions that most other districts across the state need, so we need a special ed teacher, a math teacher, and a science teacher,” Eschler said.

Pamela Susice, a co-president of the district’s teachers’ union, said some teachers were able to find and take jobs closer to home, or in the instructional area they are most passionate about.

“We are in an employment market now for teachers. There were many positions available where teachers could choose to go elsewhere,” Susice said.

A nationwide teacher shortage has hit North County districts hard for the last few years. Because of high competition, St. Regis Falls was already down a guidance counselor, school psychologist and speech pathologist in the 2023-24 school year.

In the eventuality that the district can’t hire the high school special education, math and science teachers they need, Superintendent Eschler said the school is exploring other options, like itinerant BOCES teachers, distance learning, and dually licensed teachers within the school.

Most of its 11th and 12th graders are going to career and technical education programs at the local Franklin-Essex-Hamilton BOCES, so Eschler said there are possibilities there.

“It’s a possibility while they’re in their CTE program, they will also get, let’s say, an English credit, or they may get a math credit while they’re out there. We’re still plowing through what the master schedule could look like, and then we would know what that looked like for each of our kids,” Eschler said.

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Fears of “tuitioning” feed community rumors

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The significant loss of teachers, particularly the local and tenured ones, begs this question: what happened here?

Many of the departing teachers referred to a meeting held on March 12 in teacher Jamie LeRoux’s classroom as a tipping point. Several dozen staff and Superintendent Eschler were in attendance. They were meeting to talk about the district’s financial position.

“We were told in exact words, that it was a ‘very real possibility’ that they were going to have to send our ninth through 12th grade students out to another district,” LeRoux said of the meeting.

That’s called tuitioning, and in practice, it would have eliminated the high school and all its teachers.

That’s the moment people started to panic, LeRoux said. “I know three people who filled out applications that day,” she said.

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A serious financial gap looming

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Superintendent Eschler said that conversation happened in the context of a much larger issue: the district’s financial health.

Eschler said the district had dealt with money trouble for years before she arrived in January 2023. “This district was in financial difficulty five years ago,” Eschler said.

She said that’s because of overall declining enrollment in the district and the region. The school’s population is just over 200 students — half of what it was 30 years ago. She also pointed to inflation, and increased costs for services as factors in the district’s financial situation.

Eschler said COVID relief money masked the gap. But last year, American Rescue Plan Act money was officially in the rearview mirror.

“That [gap] just showed up exponentially now, because of inflation and some of the other economic factors. Now, it’s even more intense and the gap is now bigger,” she said.

In January, when Eschler and the school board started working on the next year’s budget, she said they found the district was facing a budget shortfall of between $1.3 million to $1.4 million.

That was without potential state aid cuts. Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed eliminating a budget clause called “hold harmless,” which would have reduced St. Regis Falls CSD’s state aid by around another $500,000. In the actual final budget, “hold harmless” was maintained. But in March, Eschler said the district was looking at a potential $2 million gap.

Eschler said she and the board looked at many options to save money. During a public budget workshop meeting in early March, one of the dozens of options they talked about was the idea of tuitioning out their high school students, she said.

Eschler said in the March 12 meeting with teachers, she was answering staff questions and simply relayed that tuitioning was one option among many.

“At that time I said, ‘I am telling you everything that I do know.’ And they continued to be scared after that meeting, and I can understand why because we were in a serious budget shortfall,” she said.

Eschler said she never said that tuitioning was likely, and that the teachers misheard or misinterpreted her.

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“Rumors started swirling”

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Whatever the exact words were in the March 12 meeting were, the result was that, “rumors started swirling. It created a lot of fear. It created a lot of uncertainty,” said Maggie Engels, who was a new school board member at the time. She was appointed to a vacated seat in January.

“I think the rumor going around at the time, it was like, ‘It’s closing. It’s a done deal. This is happening,'” Engels said.

There’s no local paper in St. Regis Falls, and school board members say meetings are sparsely attended. Until recently, the school board meeting minutes were also undetailed, and sometimes absent, because the district didn’t have a clerk and board members were taking minutes.

Engels said that’s part of why she joined the school board in the first place.

“A lot of people talk, but when it comes time for the meetings, I don’t see those faces here. And I think that public involvement is really important. If you want facts, come to the meetings,” Engels said.

Eschler, Engels and several former board members all said they clarified at the next school board meeting that tuitioning had just been an option, and upon further investigation was no longer on the table.

Nevertheless, Engels said rumors snowballed in and out of the school. “In my mind, a lot of teachers just went out there and, with that uncertainty and that instability, they applied elsewhere, unfortunately.”

Former board member Lyndon Farmer said he was frustrated that Superintendent Eschler talked about tuitioning with the staff, long before the state’s final budget came out, and said so at the follow-up meeting.

“I said, ‘We never told the superintendent to say that.’ All that’s going to do is frighten people and cause an exodus. And I was right,” he said.

Teachers say that afterward, neither the superintendent nor the board put out a public statement about tuitioning, and Superintendent Eschler did not meet with teachers to directly reassure them about the situation.

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A revolving door of leadership

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But long before March 2024, the district had other and more chronic issues it was facing.

Declining enrollment and the teacher shortage were two of them.

Another was chronic instability in the district’s leadership. St. Regis Falls has had a revolving door of administrators for decades.

Lyndon Farmer, who is also a former teacher of the district, said he worked under dozens of superintendents and principals. “It’s the nature of it. Small school, people view it as the stepping stone. They come and get experience and move on,” he said.

Farmer said that’s something teachers came to expect.

The school board has been just as tumultuous, with an ever-changing roster and lots of mid-term resignations. Farmer said historically, the board has often been hard to fill in their small town.

“Oftentimes in the past, no one else has run against a person,” Farmer said. “It’s sort of like, if it’s a body and they put their name on the ballot and get their 25 signatures, they’re in.”

But many members haven’t stayed for more than one term, and some don’t even make it through their full term.

For example, the seven members that were sitting on the school board in June of 2023 were almost completely different by 2024.

Engels replaced a resignation in January. Farmer himself resigned in June. Gabe Susice resigned in mid-July. Former President Michelle Brockway lost to a write-in candidate in a 123-38 runoff vote in May.

Teachers and staff said there was palpable tension between members of the board, as well as friction between Eschler and different members of the board, at different times.

The constant churn of the school board has had a real impact on the health of the district, said Holly Scott, who taught in St. Regis Falls for 22 years and was one of the retirements this year.

She said the revolving door means the board is always in a state of learning.

“They’re always freshmen then, right? They don’t really know what to do or how to conduct business. And if you’re always having a majority of the board being like that, then you struggle getting anything done,” Scott said.

But Scott also noted that the board has a lot of power: it hires and fires administrators. It has the ultimate say when hiring a new superintendent. And the board sets the tone for the whole district.

“The district needs to have somebody leading it and making decisions for the good of kids, and seeing that things go properly,” said Scott. She said interpersonal conflicts have caused people “to step down when people are really needed.”

Last November, the school board fired the K-8 and the high school principals on the same day. Both were women and relatively new principals who began in the summer of 2022. Neither the board nor the superintendent shared any details, and the teachers I spoke with said they never learned the reasons why they were fired.

Scott called it “horrifying” and terrible for morale.

“Just the interpersonal devastation to watch this happen to these young women, to be let go like that … it was really bad,” Scott said. “It was discouraging because it did feel like, well, if two principals could be let go on the same day, what could happen to the rest of the teaching staff?”

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The new superintendent

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On top of the revolving door, the school board issues, and the budget problems was dissatisfaction with the new superintendent, Nicole Eschler.

NCPR spoke with a half dozen teachers, who all said they had some form of difficulty working with Eschler.

Arlington Collins is another longtime teacher who just retired after 27 years of teaching in St. Regis Falls. He served as president of the teachers’ union several times.

“I’ve been always able to work with superintendents and principals, whether we agreed or disagreed, we were able to hash it out,” he said. “I was not able to do that with the current superintendent. She was the most difficult administrator I’ve ever had to work with.”

Collins said Eschler micromanaged teachers and talked down to them. “I think many people felt that way, that their intelligence was being insulted.”

Holly Scott characterized it as an “over-explanation of simple things and we were insulted quite often.”

Scott and Collins said the school environment became more and more tense in the 2023-24 school year, and the March 12 meeting pushed some teachers over the edge.

In that school year, there were five different principals, and none of them served the whole year. That meant Eschler was the only consistent administrator.

Eschler has had a long career in education, but this is her first in-school administrator job in decades. She previously worked at a BOCES in Ithaca, and for private-sector education companies before that.

Eschler said everyone has their own perceptions, and that she doesn’t directly supervise teachers.

“I’m in classrooms. I’m in the cafeteria. I’m at sporting events. So I do have a lot of interaction, but it’s more pleasantries or problem-solving. So the day-to-day supervision happens from the principals.”

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The school forges ahead

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In the end, there’s a huge tangle of reasons that the St. Regis Falls school district is in such disarray right now: current and past leadership, small-town politics and drama, and a lot of dysfunction.

Some words residents use to describe the town are “tight-knit,” “close,” and “supportive,” but also “gossipy,” “insular,” and “resistant to the outside.”

But Eschler, Engels, and both co-presidents of the teachers’ union say the school is opening this fall.

The district recently hired a K-12 building principal. Eschler said that’s part of the downsizing the district is making to meet its budget gap: reducing overall staff from 83 to 67.

“We want the kids to see that we’re positive and know that everything’s going to be OK, because they’re our number one concern. So we’re going to do anything and everything to make their experiences the same as before or even better,” said Nicole Manley, one of the co-presidents of the teachers’ union.

Manley said they want students to be “hopeful of the change, and accepting of the change.”

Pamela Susice, the other union co-president, saw many students during summer enrichment programs and said they’re excited to return to school.

“They’re very happy where they are right now.” She said she intends to enter September with a positive mindset. “Kids are going to be excited to come back. Change is scary…but Nicole and I will be there,” she said.

Eschler said she believes in the future of the district.

“We have an incredible amount of potential in this community and this district. And it can change quickly because we have a lot of smart people and a lot of goodwill,” she said. “Certainly I’ve made a lot of mistakes. We’ve made mistakes. We’re only going to grow forward by acknowledging that we are all making mistakes, but we are going to work together and talk and open up the lines of communication and lay down some of our own agenda, our own will, to join together for what is truly important for our kids.”

Maggie Engels was elected the school board president in June.

She said her main goal is to get the board, superintendent and teachers all working together. She’s hoping to bring transparency and better communication to the board and wants to reestablish relationships with the teachers.

She said there’s no other choice because they have wonderful students who deserve a functional district.

“There are students doing incredible things here. And those things have been overshadowed by all of this crap,” Engels said.

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All in for the students

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There were just a few things that every person interviewed for this story agreed on, and one of them was appreciation for the students of St. Regis Falls.

“Our kids really are outstanding. The disciplinary issues here are nothing compared to elsewhere,” Eschler said. “These are incredible, incredible kids.”

Arlington Collins said all the teachers were at St. Regis Falls “because of the students,” and it was the honor of his life to teach them.

Engels’ kids are students in the district. For them, she says she wishes she had a time machine to do things differently, and to make the teachers who have left want to stay. “And I would just like to tell them ‘I’m sorry.’ I wish we could go back and have a meeting and say ‘We’re not closing the high school.’ I just wish that we could go back and reassure them, and bring those teachers back… but we can’t.”

She said the community has to start working together.

“We have to collaborate. We have to work together. We have to,” said Engels. “There is no other way.”

The stakes here are high: for the future of the school district, for the town’s sense of identity, and above all else, for the remaining students.