Though an effort to mandate open enrollment statewide is on life support in the legislature, the expansion of the universal school choice policy has entered a new phase at the local level.
Concerned about the prospect of unpredictable tuition bills, voters in nearly 100 school districts this spring adopted their own programs, which include limits on the number of students who can enter and leave their districts through open enrollment.
Now, school boards and administrators in districts that opted to allow students from elsewhere to enroll must work out the specifics of this new educational paradigm.
With little guidance from the current state law, school boards have begun to grapple in recent weeks with questions about when to set application deadlines, to what extent to recruit students, and whether to provide any guarantees about just how long students can remain enrolled, even if a school ultimately runs out of space for them.
“Would we guarantee a kindergartner a spot all the way through graduation?” Pembroke school board member Kerri Dean wondered during a meeting last week.
The implementation of plans deliberated this spring could offer a glimpse of what is to come if the legislature ultimately passes a new law mandating open enrollment everywhere. Under the current law, districts can restrict students from leaving through open enrollment if they choose.
The coming months could also provide a better sense of just how many families may take advantage of open enrollment if it were available to them.
So far, interest has been relatively lackluster, superintendents said in interviews.
In Merrimack Valley, which was the first school district in the capital region to set an application deadline for families, just one student applied. Other school districts in the area that voted to accept students this year have not formally opened their application windows yet.
Prospect Mountain High School, which led the charge on open enrollment by establishing a program in 2023, is expected to enroll about 40 students through the program next year, according to Superintendent Tim Broadrick. Ten to twelve of the students are expected to be new, while the rest already attend the school.
Broadrick said he believed the legislative back-and-forth about a universal bill has tamped down some interest this year.
“Until there’s clarity and certainty coming out of Concord, I just think that families will be a little reluctant in many cases to sort of commit their children to this kind of thing,” Broadrick said in an interview.
After almost two dozen House Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic caucus to vote down a universal open enrollment bill late last month, that clarity appears unlikely to arrive this year, though lawmakers are expected to meet in the coming weeks to attempt to forge a compromise.
Three types of districts
Spurred by a consequential state Supreme Court decision last fall, voters in the majority of school districts approved open enrollment programs this spring.
The votes they took (or didn’t) have divided districts into three categories.
The smallest and simplest bucket encompasses the districts that adopted policies that prohibit students from both entering and exiting their schools via open enrollment. Eleven school districts, including Bow and Dunbarton, fall into this category, according to data collected by Reaching Higher NH, a pro-public education advocacy organization.
These districts should not expect any changes next year unless the legality of their restrictive policies is challenged in court, which some experts say is possible.
The second bucket includes the districts that don’t have an open enrollment policy at all. Fifty-five school districts, including Concord, Epsom and Deerfield, fall into this category, according to Reaching Higher, which last updated its data in early April.
The lack of a policy places these districts at risk of being on the hook for tuition payments, because students who reside in these districts can enroll at another school. Under the current law, the home district must pay 80% of its average cost per pupil to the district in which a student enrolls.
The final and largest bucket includes the districts that adopted policies allowing students to enroll in their schools. Eighty-five districts fall into this category, including Merrimack Valley, Pembroke, Hopkinton, and many others in the region.
These policies vary significantly within this group. The maximum number of students these districts can accept ranges from as low as one to as high as 324 students. In all but four districts, students are prohibited from leaving through open enrollment.
Many policies, little movement
Despite the flurry of policies adopted this year, little migration of students to new schools is expected next fall.
This is in part because at least 57% of school districts have adopted policies that prohibit students from enrolling elsewhere through open enrollment, according to the Reaching Higher analysis. (School leaders in these districts point out that families can still pursue other options, including manifest hardship and best-interest placement options, if their child is not having a good experience at their hometown school.)
School districts that have chosen to accept students will have to decide how to deal with applicants who reside in districts trying to prohibit them from leaving through open enrollment.
In Merrimack Valley, the lone student who applied fell into this category, and so the district rejected them.
Other superintendents, including in Kearsarge, Pembroke, Chichester and Allenstown, said they will have to check the policy of an applicant’s home district before deciding whether to accept them.
Prospect Mountain, which will likely have the most open enrollment students next year, will continue to accept applicants from anywhere, despite the restrictive policies that now exist.
“It doesn’t seem to make sense that the receiving district would be responsible for keeping track of what every district in the state might have done about this,” Broadrick, the superintendent, said. “So the only way I see to proceed is to simply send out notifications in August.”
He said that even if school districts don’t pay tuition, families will never be on the hook for payments.
In some school administrative offices that include multiple districts, the same administrator might have to manage a student who wishes to transfer from one district to another. Jessica Bickford, for example, leads both Pembroke — which is actively seeking to attract new students — and Deerfield — which didn’t adopt an open enrollment policy.
“We could find ourselves in a situation where one of our students within our own SAU is transferring between districts,” Bickford said in an interview, “and I think just having upfront and honest conversations with the boards when that happens or if that happens, will just be a bridge that I cross when we get there.”
School districts that plan to accept students are also approaching recruitment in different ways. At one end of the spectrum, Kearsarge’s school board has been “very clear” that it doesn’t want to actively recruit students, Superintendent John Fortney said.
“You want to try to be a good neighbor” to neighboring districts, he said.
In the middle, Merrimack Valley created a page on its website for open enrollment, but didn’t go beyond that.
At the other end of the spectrum, Pembroke plans to actively seek out students. Its school administrative unit has repurposed an administrative position to increasingly focus on marketing and public relations.
“I do believe we have a lot to offer here at Pembroke Academy that is not well known, and we need to push that out,” Pembroke school board chair Melanie Camelo said in January.
Bickford, the superintendent, said she has received interest from about 20 families, though the district has not yet formally opened its application window or determined whether those families reside in districts with restrictive open enrollment policies.
No policy, some risk
Though the bulk of the administrative burden falls on the 85 districts that have decided to welcome new students, the potential financial risk would affect the 55 districts without a policy at all.
In most of these districts, school boards opted against placing a warrant on their residents’ ballots. In three cases, including in the town of Epsom, voters rejected the warrant article before them.
Epsom Superintendent Jack Finley said that despite the lack of policy in place, he is confident families won’t choose to go elsewhere.
“I think that it’s a joy to attend the school in the community where you reside,” Finley said in an interview, “so I’m not really concerned about people that desire to leave.”
Concord, which has an autonomous Board of Education, also has not adopted a policy. Superintendent Tim Herbert did not respond to a request for comment about the status of open enrollment in the district, but minutes from an April 13 instructional committee meeting suggest Concord’s board is considering adopting a policy that would restrict students from both enrolling and leaving the district.
