“They’d be smart to get a legal opinion first,” said Elliott Krieger, a spokesperson for RIDE. “We’re concerned with the equity and access of all students in general.”

Keiger said he first learned of the proposal this morning via an article in the Providence Journal, in which it was reported that Barrington is considering making ten slots available to families willing to pay $12,800, the per pupil cost of educating a child in Barrington, in tuition to attend school there.

Patrick Guida, the chair of the Barrington School Committee as well as the vice chair of the state Board of Regents, said there are potential legal issues to grapple with before the district could put the plan into effect, such as whether the plan would effectively discriminate against students with special needs or even those who couldn’t afford to pay the tuition.

“If there are any legal issues we would cancel the whole thing,” he said, but added: “By virtue of us making this opportunity available, we ought to have some opportunity for discretion.”

One way the school district may accommodate for students with special needs, Guida said, is to offer an additional two slots to students with special needs if a family was willing to for the cost of their child’s education. Special needs students can cost much more to educate than the average student, ranging anywhere from $16,000 to $100,000, Guida said.

The proposal is still very much on the drawing board and the schools have still not gotten a legal opinion from its solicitor, Guida said.

He said he spoke with Krieger about the plan this morning, but has yet to discuss the matter with Deborah Gist, the commissioner of education. Krieger said Gist is out of town and won’t be available until Monday.

“I wouldn’t say I didn’t talk to anyone at RIDE about it,” he said. When asked who he spoke with, he said, “I’m not at liberty to say.”

Tim Duffy, the executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, said Lincoln is considering a similar proposal and that is not unlike the mayoral academy in Cumberland set up by Mayor Dan McKee, that serves students from Cumberland as well as neighboring towns.

Some  worry that the proposal could start a trend of affluent suburban communities with high performing schools drawing away from less-affluent districts the students whose families can afford to pay the tuition costs, thus exacerbating the divide between education in affluent and poor communities.

“What we need to work towards is ensuring all our students in every community, regardless of their income level or background, have access to a ‘Barrington’ education,” said Maryellen Butke, the executive director of RI-CAN, a group that supports public education reform and school choice. “Those who don’t have the means to move to a high performing community like Barrington or pay the $12,800 in tuition deserve access to a high quality public education as well. RI-CAN supports giving access to great public schools to all Rhode Island kids.”

Rest in peace, Peter Lord, the hugely-respected Projo environmental reporter who died yesterday of a brain tumor, and thank you so much for your years of explaining our natural world to us.

Thank you Gov. Chafee, for declining to give URI professors 3 percent raises at the same time that tuition is going up 9.5 percent. (I’m sure to hear from an ex-prof or two for this line, but oh well…)

As Providence is asking retirees to take a cut in benefits, the city failed to apply for $1.6 million in federal reimbursement from the Affordable Care Act to help offset these kinds of costs. Remarkably, the Capital City said it asked two health care providers to complete the application for it! I guess the old saying is true: if you want something done right, do it yourself. If you don’t, hire a health care provider.

More bad news for Barry Hinckley’s campaign for Senate. His spokesman John Loughlin has resigned after an erroneous attack on Sheldon Whitehouse’s Buffett Rule bill.  No word yet on whether Loughlin will be replaced by Hudson Hinckley, the previous campaign insider to give the candidate some bad press…

Congrats to Allan Tear, founder of Betaspring, who was asked by President Obama to join him at the White House today when he signs a bill into law that will help small businesses like his raise ore investment money.

Sen. Jack Reed will be at the soon-to-be-operational Wickford Junction train depot this morning, which is slated to start service later this month. The developers of the project have been waiting some 30 years for rail service in North Kingstown.

Turns out ALEC, the secretive business-backed group that quietly pushes for local legislation often bad for democracy and citizens, was behind the law that allowed Trayvon Martin’s killer to walk away without being charged.

Please, local media, give us less updates on lottery winners …. after all, lotteries are little more than a “cheap tax on the poor.”

Congrats to President Obama, who now seems guaranteed to get to run against Mitt Romney for re-election. “I’ve yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year,” GOP cheerleader Joe Scarborough said yesterday.

“It is in our national interest to try and keep student loan rates low,” said Reed in a statement about his bill that would prevent the interest rate on Stafford loans from doubling. “As the price of college continues to increase, more students are forced to take out bigger loans to pay for their education.”

Reed’s office said the interest rate on Stafford Loans is slated to double in July, from 3.4 to 6.8 percent. According to the release, 7.8 million low- and middle-income students across the country utilize Stafford loans, 36,000 of whom are from Rhode Island. There are 8,000 URI students who utilize Staford loans.

Sen. Whitehouse will be at the Comprehensive Community Action Program’s headquarters (311 Doric Ave, Cranston) to discuss his Buffett Rule bill that would, according to his staff, “ensure that multi-million-dollar earners pay at least a 30 percent effective tax rate.”

In an article in today’s Journal about a Q&A session with URI president David Dooley, Gina Macris writes: “He spoke at length about the ‘great deal of misinformation’ about the causes of higher tuition and mounting student debt, singling out ‘misguided editorials like the one in The Providence Journal on Saturday.'”

Misguided indeed.

The editorial board seemed to be writing about the rising cost of tuition, then quickly veered into how college isn’t for everybody – almost as if this was part justification for the cost of college rising.

“For many years, college tuitions have risen at up to three times the general inflation rate,” Saturday’s editorial said. “This has happened as society’s leaders constantly harp on the importance for many young people of getting a college education. That idea is exaggerated in our view; for many people, obtaining a post-high-school vocational education would be considerably more useful than going to a liberal-arts college.”

It’s true that tuition is rising far faster than general inflation. And it’s true that our leaders “harp on” the importance of a higher education (as well they should). It’s also true college isn’t for everyone and many are better served with a vocational education. But to put those three statements together makes it seem as if the Projo thinks we are wasting our time trying to make college available to the masses and we might as well just send the smartest and richest and let the rest enjoy auto shop – or eat cake, as it were.

Dooley took issue with the Projo’s insistence that “curious courses” and high-paid staff were driving up costs at URI.

“A proliferation of curious courses is not a cost-driver at URI,” Macris said he said. And she also quoted him as saying, “we are driving up higher education costs because we are anxious to add higher-paid administrators is one of the sillier things that I’ve read.”

Dooley knows the real reason tuition is going up, and he explained it to me last week.

“Public higher education is increasingly seen really out of necessity I think in the view of a lot legislators as a discretionary part of the state budget,” he said. “They have long assumed … that if they fund higher education less and ask families to do more, Americans have such a strong belief in the value of higher education, particularly public higher education, that they will pay more and they have been willing to do that for two decades. ”

Dooley called this model “unsustainable.”

While their tactics were lighthearted, the issue is a serious one. The Board of Governors recently approved a 8 percent tuition increase that will mean this September an in-state student will pay an extra $1000 a year, up from $10,400. Since 2008, said spokesman Mike Trainer, the legislature has cut some $45 million to the three state colleges in Rhode Island. But because the cost of an education is only getting more expensive, students are running up enormous student loan debt to pay for the cost cutting.

There was a brief moment of tension when Professor Scott Molloy, who showed up late, asked to speak even though he didn’t sign up to and Chairman Lorne Adrain asked officers to prevent him from doing so.

Aftewards, I spoke with URI President David Dooley about the issue. He told me that legislators seem to view funding higher education as “discretionary” because when they make cuts, tuition goes up and enrollment doesn’t suffer. He also said the state would be wise to invest more in higher education.