Chaplin / Regional District 11 Shared Central Office

Background memo for the superintendent-pay comparison. Chaplin was the structural oddball in the 45-district elementary set: it shares its entire central office (including the superintendent) with Regional School District 11, so its “superintendent salary” is a negotiated fraction of a shared position rather than a clean single-district number. This memo documents exactly how that split works and what the FY 2025-26 numbers are, sourced to the adopted budgets.

Bottom line

Chaplin Elementary School (CES) and Regional School District 11 (Parish Hill Middle/High School, PHMS/HS) run one shared central office governed by a Central Office Committee (COC). The COC adopts a single central-office budget each year and splits every function between the two districts by a negotiated, function-specific percentage. For FY 2025-26 the total COC budget is $1,006,485, divided $485,479 to Chaplin (about 48%) and $521,005 to RD 11 (about 52%).

The split is not one blanket percentage. Each office carries its own ratio:

For superintendent-pay purposes: the superintendent’s salary line in the COC budget is $141,750 for FY 2025-26, split $56,700 to Chaplin (40%) and $85,050 to RD 11 (60%).

How the two districts relate

The shared office spans two legally distinct school systems:

Chaplin is the common thread: it is both a member town of RD 11 and the operator of its own elementary school, and the two systems share one administration.

The Central Office Committee and how costs are split

The governing document

The authoritative allocation schedule is the Central Office Committee Budget 25-27, COC-approved March 19, 2025. It is not published as a standalone file, but it is embedded (pages 26 onward) inside Chaplin’s FY 2025-26 Revised Budget Package. The same object-309 “CENTRAL OFFICE” charges also appear, split out by function, in each district’s own adopted budget: the RD 11 side in the RD 11 FY 2025-26 budget, the Chaplin side in the Chaplin budget package.

The COC budget presents each central-office function with four year-columns (2022-23 audited through 2025-26) followed by two allocation columns showing the Chaplin dollar share and the RD 11 dollar share, plus a plain-language annotation (for example “40% Chaplin”) on the lead salary line of each office.

Per-function allocation percentages, FY 2025-26

Central-office function Chaplin RD 11
Superintendent’s Office 40% 60%
Business Office 40% 60%
Special Education Office 50% 50%
Maintenance (Object 114) 25% 75%
Technology / IT Director ~80% ~20%

The maintenance ratio is baked into the object label itself (“MAINTENANCE-25/75”). The technology ratio is inferred from the two sides’ 309 charges (Chaplin $118,296 vs. RD 11 $29,573), so treat it as approximate pending the COC line detail. The differing per-function ratios are why the aggregate split lands near 48/52 even though the two biggest offices are 40/60.

FY 2025-26 dollar figures

Total shared central office

Measure Amount
Total COC budget (all functions) $1,006,485
Chaplin (CES) object-309 charges $485,479
RD 11 (PHMS/HS) object-309 charges $521,005

The two 309 totals sum to $1,006,484, matching the COC total within rounding. The COC budget rose 2.95% ($28,832) over the prior year.

The three offices that matter for supe-pay work

Superintendent’s Office (Function 2320):

Line Total Chaplin 40% RD 11 60%
Superintendent salary (2320.101) $141,750 $56,700 $85,050
Total Superintendent’s Office $257,092 $102,837 $154,255

Business Office (Function 2510):

Line Total Chaplin 40% RD 11 60%
Business Manager salary (2510.104) $56,270 $22,508 $33,762

Special Education Office (Function 1210):

Line Total Chaplin 50% RD 11 50%
SpEd/Pupil Personnel Dir (1210.107) $130,871 $65,436 $65,436
Total Special Education Office $237,376 $118,688 $118,688

For reference, the superintendent salary line has moved $89,164 (FY 2023-24 audited) to $132,600 (FY 2024-25) to $141,750 (FY 2025-26). The jump between 2023-24 and 2024-25 is large enough to suggest a superintendent transition rather than a raise, which is worth confirming if the salary series matters to the comparison.

What this means for the superintendent-pay comparison

Chaplin does not employ a stand-alone superintendent. The person is shared with RD 11 (and, per press coverage, also serves Hampton Elementary). Three different numbers could each be the “right” one depending on the methodology:

  1. Full superintendent salary as carried in the COC budget: $141,750. This is the figure most comparable to another district’s superintendent salary, but it covers the Chaplin-plus-RD 11 workload only.
  2. Chaplin’s attributed share: $56,700 (40%). This is what the town of Chaplin actually pays toward the superintendent. It understates the compensation of the person, but correctly states Chaplin’s cost.
  3. Full central-office cost, not just salary. If the comparison is about administrative overhead rather than one salary, the relevant Chaplin figure is the $485,479 total 309 charge, or the $102,837 Chaplin superintendent’s-office share including benefits and support staff.

The cleanest footnote for the cross-district table is probably: Chaplin shares a superintendent with RD 11 on a 40/60 basis; the superintendent’s salary is $141,750, of which Chaplin bears $56,700. Then pick whichever of those two numbers matches how the other 44 districts are counted.

One open question flagged below: whether $141,750 is the superintendent’s full contractual salary or only the Chaplin-plus-RD 11 portion, since the same person reportedly also superintends Hampton Elementary.

History of the arrangement

The central-office compact once covered the elementary schools of all three RD 11 towns (Chaplin, Hampton, Scotland) plus the regional secondary school. The Hampton and Scotland elementary boards withdrew from the central-office compact in the early 2000s, leaving today’s two-party arrangement between Chaplin Elementary and RD 11 / Parish Hill.

In 2016-2017 a formally constituted Dissolution Committee studied dissolving RD 11 outright and issued a Final Report in 2017 (with appendices on member-town start-up costs and a State Board of Education letter of action). The region was not dissolved, and the shared-office structure has continued.

Distinction from the town-assessment formula

Do not conflate the two different “splits” in play:

A number pulled from the wrong one of these will not reconcile.

Open items to verify

Sources

All links verified accessible July 2, 2026. Primary budget documents first.

Primary budget documents

Governance and structural documents

Secondary coverage and rosters