Pittsfield voters hadn’t opted to pay for local kids to attend schools outside of their district, but an order from the New Hampshire Supreme Court now mandates it.
Justices wrote in an opinion released Friday that districts like Pittsfield, where 11 local students have left to go to school elsewhere, must pay tuition to the schools that those kids attend — regardless of whether their town has voted to do so or not.
The decision affirms a ruling by the state Board of Education and clears up a major point of contention for open enrollment in New Hampshire, as some school districts have argued taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill for students who exit their hometown schools without having a say. School choice advocates, on the other hand, have championed the idea.
In a process termed “open enrollment,” state law allows school districts to vote to accept students from other areas. The law requires the “sending” school district, where the student was originally enrolled, to pay 80% of its per-pupil tuition rate to the “receiving” district.
The Prospect Mountain School District has been the only one to opt in to the program and receive out-of-district students at its high school. Traditionally, the school district has served students in Alton and Barnstead, but through open enrollment, it has drawn more than a dozen kids who live in surrounding towns, including Pittsfield and Epsom.
Both of those school districts initially refused to pay Prospect Mountain tuition, and in both cases, the State Board of Education ruled that they must.
Pittsfield appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the district didn’t have the authority to pay Prospect Mountain because the town had never voted to become a “sending” school district.
Superintendent Sandie MacDonald said the ruling presents financial uncertainty for the already-struggling district, which has about 500 students, a roughly $11 million budget and a $1.8 million deficit.
“This presents a significant challenge for Pittsfield because the number of students who may choose to leave in any given year is unknown and outside local control, yet the District must budget for the required tuition,” she said in an email to the Monitor. “When students depart, our fixed operating costs remain the same, but they are spread across fewer students. At the same time, our out-of-district tuition obligations increase as more students enroll elsewhere.”
In an interview earlier this month, before the Supreme Court ruling, MacDonald said she doesn’t think it’s fair to force those costs on a town that hasn’t voted to accept them.
“That is incredibly unfair to the community in Pittsfield,” MacDonald said. “If they had voted for that as a community and said, ‘We want to do this,’ then that’s a different story. But they haven’t, and I think that they do understand the financial impact on them.”
MacDonald estimated that if Pittsfield is required to pay all the tuition it’s refused to Prospect Mountain thus far, that sum could total close to $250,000.
State law allows school districts to limit the number of students that can attend out-of-district schools, down to zero, but that requires a vote to establish themselves as an open-enrollment district.
Drew Cline, leader of conservative-learning Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy and a member of the state’s Board of Education, called the Supreme Court ruling a “victory for plain English.”
The law is clear, he said, and Pittsfield’s claim that it was legally required to adopt open enrollment by a town vote “never existed” in state statute. Cline said he likes open enrollment as a way to foster competition among school districts and improve educational outcomes.
“I would be hopeful that this would show districts that you can do it, and there’s a pathway for it, and it’s a good option for schools,” Cline said. “Especially when we’ve seen such declining enrollment, I think every district should become an open enrollment district, and then they can compete for students and develop programs that might be specifically attractive to specific groups of students.”
The Republican-led state legislature was split on expanding open enrollment this year, and a proposal to let kids attend any school district in the state failed in the Senate.
Lawmakers hope to study the issue more, including the ins and outs of cost-sharing between “sending” and “receiving” schools. One state representative has already filed a proposal to establish a study committee dedicated to hammering out the details of open enrollment.
Jeremy Margolis contributed reporting for this story.