LAMOINE — Residents here voted 163-136 on Tuesday to have the town pay a $900 tuition surcharge for each Lamoine student who goes to Mount Desert Island High School this year.

With that vote, Lamoine avoided the likelihood that the high school board would have refused to accept any new tuition students from Lamoine after next year. In a straw poll June 14, school board members said unanimously that they would vote to exclude Lamoine students in the future if the town didn’t pay the surcharge.

Thirty-one Lamoine students are expected to attend the high school this fall. Tuition payments for those students will total about $279,000. The surcharge will add $27,900.

The surcharge is for debt service on the $7.6 million in bonds the high school sold in 2000 to build an arts wing and make other capital improvements. The bonds will be paid off in 2020.

The high school is operated by the four Mount Desert Island towns, whose citizens fund it through property taxes. To help the MDI towns retire the debt, all of the surrounding towns that pay tuition for students to attend the school agreed to pay an additional 10 percent debt service surcharge. For the school year that just ended, the tuition towns paid $9,786 per student, including the surcharge.

For more education news, pick up a copy of the Mount Desert Islander.