By her senior year at Durango High School, Tori Duhaime was “kind of over the whole high school thing.”

So instead of hanging out at DHS, she enrolled in three classes at Fort Lewis College during the spring semester and tried out the life of a college student.

“It was a good chance to get myself eased into the whole college atmosphere,” said Duhaime, who is heading to the University of Alabama this fall. She also earned 12 college credits for the classes she took in sociology, semantics and dance.

Fort Lewis College and area high schools are hoping that more high school students will now be able to taste the college experience after the college’s recent decision to decrease tuition rates for concurrent enrollment.

This month, FLC announced it would lower the cost per credit hour by 42 percent for area public school students who participate in its concurrent enrollment program. The rate, currently $184 for residents, will now match the Colorado community college tuition rate of $105.85 per credit hour, said Andy Burns, the college’s director of admissions.

The decrease was one of several mandates outlined in the Concurrent Enrollment Programs Act, passed by state legislators in 2009 to promote concurrent enrollment, reduce dropout rates and increase postsecondary degrees. Even so, there are ways for colleges to get out of lowering those rates, Burns said. Colleges can opt out of providing concurrent enrollment or run those classes through continuing education programs, a loophole that allows them to charge regular resident tuition rates, Burns said.

Another option for colleges, one that made public schools cringe, was to charge families the difference between regular tuition rate and concurrent tuition rate, said Amy Kendziorski, 9-R’s executive director of student support services.

But the college wanted to continue with concurrent enrollment, so administrators decided to drop their rates.

“(FLC administrators) saw this as an opportunity to give back to the local community,” Burns said.

Data shows that at least 83percent of high school students who enrolled concurrently at FLC between 2006 and 2008 were either enrolled in or had graduated from an institution of higher education as of this spring (the college could not find data on 17 percent of the students). That’s compared with about 44 percent of ninth-graders statewide who enter college, according to a 2010 report from the Colorado Department of Higher Education.

The number of students from 9-R who participate in concurrent enrollment programs at Fort Lewis and Southwest Colorado Community College has grown steadily over the last several years and took a giant leap last year, Kendziorski said. Part of the reason is that the concurrent enrollment act started allowing students to take college classes to fulfill high school graduation requirements, she said.

But the district went “way over budget” last year and has had to start putting more limitations on when students can concurrently enroll in college classes. A class in a certain subject area or difficulty level must be available only at the college for students to be guaranteed the go-ahead to concurrently enroll, Kendziorski said.

As school budgets are trimmed, more classes are offered only at the college level, which makes concurrent enrollment even more important, said 9-R Superintendent Keith Owen.

The decreased tuition rates will help the district expand the number of pathways they can take to finish high school, which is always a plus, Owen said.

“It opens up a whole different group of options for kids that wasn’t readily available in the past,” he said.

ecowan@durangoherald.com