Even leaders from school districts that would likely benefit financially from universal open enrollment are sharply critical of a plan to fast-track the rollout of the new policy.
Hundreds of school board members and school administrators from across the state have signed an open letter calling on lawmakers to slow their push to adopt the new policy, which would allow students to attend any public school in the state at the expense of the school district in which they reside.
Until last week, the policy had not been expected to go into effect until the start of next school year at the earliest.
That timeline accelerated significantly when Republican senators tacked the policy onto an unrelated House bill last Thursday, bypassing the standard hearing process. If passed by the House and signed into law by Gov. Kelly Ayotte, the bill would go into effect immediately, potentially as soon as later this month.
The House will be in session on Thursday and could take the bill up then, though it is not expected to do so, according to one representative with knowledge of the anticipated schedule. A spokesperson for Ayotte did not respond to a question on whether she would sign the fast-tracked bill if it reached her desk.
School board members said the law raises a bevy of unanswered financial, enrollment and other logistical questions about how universal open enrollment would be implemented.
“While some students are able to transfer to districts with greater opportunities, those students without transportation are left behind in districts with fewer resources and diminished programs,” the letter states. “If choice is not available to all students, it is not truly choice.”
Concord’s Board of Education took the unusual step on Monday of authorizing its board president and superintendent to issue an official statement opposing the bill and calling on lawmakers to engage in an “open and transparent discussion” about how to implement universal open enrollment.
“They have a goal, and they don’t seem to want to talk to anyone about how to get there,” board President Pam Walsh said of the legislators.
As a large school district with a range of programs, a district like Concord would likely stand to gain students and generate tuition revenue from universal open enrollment, but board members expressed unanimous opposition to moving ahead so quickly.
A list of questions attached to the open letter shows that school board members and school administrators are uncertain about how the policy would work.
It cites a lack of clarity on how often students could shift schools and how the finances would work when they do. The letter authors ask, for example, whether a student who doesn’t make the varsity basketball team can simply withdraw and pick another school where he or she would have a better chance.
For each student who leaves, the bill would require the sending district to pay between 80 and 100 percent of its average cost per student to the student’s new school district. In certain cases, it would require parents to pay the difference in tuition between their new district’s cost per pupil and their old one’s.
The proposed law also requires each school district to post its “capacity” for new students at each grade level, but it doesn’t specify how that number is calculated.
Curtis Hamilton, the vice chair of the Contoocook Valley School Board, drafted the open letter along with two board members from other districts, Micaela Demeter of Dover and Lil Maughan of Lebanon.
Hamilton said the trio were motivated to sound the alarm on a policy that he worried would lead to widespread confusion and decimate some school districts.
“Open enrollment for sure will create winners and losers throughout the state,” he said in an interview. “Before my district is forced into a position where I have to compete for students and dollars from other communities, I wanted to be as clear as possible and let people know that open enrollment, as it’s drafted and in this state in particular, could have very devastating effects.”
Nationally, universal public school open enrollment is not a fringe policy. Twenty-five states currently mandate open enrollment, according to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
But the specifics of New Hampshire’s funding model, which relies on local sources of revenue to fund education at the highest rate in the country, would make small, low-income districts particularly vulnerable, opponents fear.
“In the Granite State, the absence of meaningful state investment means those costs are shifted directly onto local property taxpayers, disproportionately impacting rural and lower-property-wealth districts,” the open letter states.
Supporters of the bill have characterized the implementation concerns as fear-mongering and the lack of support for open enrollment as anti-student.
“We heard these arguments before when we started venturing into charter schools,” Senate President Sharon Carson of Londonderry said last week. “Guess what? The world didn’t end.”
The open letter was drafted on Saturday and shared with lawmakers, including Ayotte’s office, on Tuesday morning. Hamilton said he had fielded dozens of calls and was “appreciative of a number of conversations with lawmakers on both sides.”
He had yet to hear from Ayotte herself.
The push to change the state law comes as local districts are increasingly adopting their own open enrollment policies, with an eye toward blocking students from leaving. The push came after the Supreme Court clarified the current state law.
Two districts in the region — Kearsarge and Pembroke — have already adopted restrictive policies since the court ruling. Another nine in the area were expected to put the question to voters this spring.
Those district-level policies would become moot if universal open enrollment became law.