BLOOMFIELD — A costly misunderstanding between the state and the school district will not keep Davis County schools from offering college level courses to their students.

“The frustrating thing for us is when we first set this up, we worked with the Department of Education,” said Davis County Superintendent Sam Miller. “For eight years, Davis County has been offering dual-credit classes.”

Those more rigorous courses can be used for high school credit at no charge. But if used as credit for a college, there has been a tuition charged to students by the district.

“This year, the Department of Education called and said you can’t charge for the classes. I asked when that would become effective. They told me it was effective right now,” Miller said Monday.

“We did provide some guidance to all school districts,” confirmed DOE spokesperson Elaine Watkins-Miller, “regarding dual enrollment and charging parents.”

Specifically, on May 1, the Iowa Department of Education sent a newsletter, in which the paragraph in question ended with “... in no event may a district charge tuition for a dual credit course.”

By the time they got the communication, Davis County High School had already billed or collected about $15,000 for the 2007-08 school year. The most recent charges are being remedied, Miller said.

“For this year, the decision is already made; we have told [parents] who have not paid they don’t have to,” he said, “and we’ll be issuing refunds to [those who paid].”

And now the district knows what they need to do, he added.

“We’re going to change our practice. We thought — and still think — we’re doing a great thing for kids. We set this up to give the kids a jump start. The good thing to come out of all this is tuition will no longer be a barrier for any student in our district. As we move forward, we still want to continue to offer dual-enrollment classes and offer even more of them — even if it costs us more. ”

The problem the district is faced with now is that because the state partially funded the courses since the beginning, students should not have been charged in years past, either.

“[On Monday night], the [school] board is going to meet in closed session with [an] attorney and discuss how we want to proceed,” Miller said.

How much money is involved is unknown presently, though Miller said they were looking at “significant amounts of money.”

He said multiplying $15,000 times seven years would not give an accurate figure because the program started out smaller. But officials will be able to come up with a number after digging through their records.

“It’ll take some legwork to get everything,” he said.