This week, the State Senate will consider SB 101, which makes open enrollment in public schools universal across the state. This will result in higher costs and higher property taxes while reducing local control of tax dollars at a time when our local communities are suffering.
As I have learned from serving on the Pembroke School Board, the current pressures on our towns are likely without precedent. The core inflation that impacts our daily lives affects our schools as well. The cost of serving our most vulnerable students receiving special education has outstripped general inflation, as have our statutory transportation obligations. Expanding state regulations and directives have increased our legal expenses. Spiraling health care expenses are the greatest driver of cost increases.
Pembroke was quoted a 30% increase in next year’s expenses from SchoolCare, which is more than double the highest year-over-year percent increase in recent memory. Meanwhile, per-student adequacy aid from the state continues to fall well short of that deemed minimally necessary by our courts.
The state could have alleviated these pressures by prioritizing aid to towns. Instead, it chose to fund Education Freedom Accounts to the tune of $51 million, allotting funds for home schooling and private school tuition, where students can be turned away for any reason, little oversight is required and many regulations that attach to public schools do not apply. A full 90% of this funding has gone to private religious schools.
Universal open enrollment will make our collective situation worse.
SB 101 creates an open public school system across the state without creating a state-wide funding structure. Local property taxes will still be collected for local schools, but those dollars can be removed by individual families at will. Yet there is no process for students to declare which schools they will attend, no deadline for such declarations, no process for switching schools, no limit to the number of times a student can change schools and no set tuition rate across the state so that school boards can begin to gauge costs. Such a change will erode local control of schools and school budgets, and it will likely result in the weakening or even closing of some rural schools.
The bill will absolutely increase the cost of public education. Absent the control mechanisms listed above, there is no scenario where a school board or SAU can budget with any clarity. We will have no idea what number we need to budget for outflowing students, and we will not be able to plan for any tuition from inflow students, as we cannot anticipate revenue beyond local taxes. Under this bill, we will be forced to guess how many students, and as such how much tax revenue, will leave the town under open enrollment. The bill itself concedes this point in its methodology section: “it is not possible to predict this bill’s impact on state aid programs, or local school district revenues or expenditures.”
That is quite the concession — and one easy to make, since the state will not bear any of the costs that it cannot calculate. For towns, though, the consequences could be drastic. Even a seemingly small number of outmigrations result in a large revenue shift. In Pembroke, for instance, a mere 5% outflow of students (n=46) to open enrollment would cost over $700,000 each year. The town’s taxpayers would be on the hook for 100% of that additional cost, as SB 101 does not provide any additional funds for this venture.
SB 101 and the broader push for universal open enrollment threatens to upend public education without regard for consequences. It is government by flailing ideological conviction, unmoored by reality, practicality, respect or competence, all done under the banners of “choice” and “freedom.” But this “freedom” will shackle our communities and threaten the bedrock principle of local control that has defined American education since Horace Mann established the first Common School.
Our current public school system and funding structure may well be ripe for reform — there is nothing magical or particularly sacred about one form over another. But SB 101 does not represent reform. It represents an effort to accelerate the multi-decade assault on public education by those who choose not to see its virtues as essential to the common good and who do not believe that those virtues should be equally available to all in every instance, as is necessary to maintain a functioning democracy. Wittingly or not, those who push for universal open will, if successful, make public education ever more expensive, and thus erode public support for it.
Our representatives and Governor still have time to make a better choice for our communities. I urge them to do so. But if SB 101 becomes law, voters will need to choose leaders better suited to the needs of the people in November.
Kenneth Nivison is a member of the Pembroke School Board.