PERU – At Tuesday night’s meeting, School Committee members capped the portion they’re willing to pay for high school tuition costs at $2,150.

Peru School is a K-8 facility that tuitions its secondary students to area high schools or private and charter schools across the state.

“We are required by town vote to pay for students going to private schools or to another town’s public high school,” said Director Richard Colpitts.

The school then gets reimbursed by the state for its tuition payments, except when sending a student to the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone.

That’s why, at the School Committee’s Aug. 19 meeting, directors voted unanimously to deny paying the remaining portion of a parent’s contribution to tuition a former Peru School student to the Limestone school.

At their Aug. 19 meeting, Superintendent John Turner said Maine pays the biggest percentage of a student’s tuition to attend the Limestone school and the youth’s parents are responsible for the remaining balance.

“The state doesn’t expect you to do this and you won’t get any reimbursement money if you do,” Turner said to directors at the Aug. 19 meeting. “By the state’s logic, they won’t reimburse you because it’s something they bill to the parents.”

However, the parent in question, Larry Gill, showed up Tuesday night, asking the committee to reconsider its motion to deny his request for assistance.

Gill said that past Peru School boards had already established a precedent of paying tuition to allow their students to attend the Limestone school.

Superintendent John Turner agreed. He could recall three cases where that had been done in the past.

“We’ve been doing it whether the state wants us to or not. So we ought to pay the amount we’ve paid for others in the past,” Colpitts said.

However, when Turner said the amounts, which past boards have paid to tuition students to the Limestone school, have risen substantially, Colpitts motioned to cap the amount at $2,150.

“We can’t continue to pay for the parents’ full amount of the share. Unless we don’t cap it, we’re going to run into problems,” he added.

The committee then voted unanimously to cap it and pay Gill’s remaining share of tuition for his daughter “in fairness to past and future cases,” Colpitts added.

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