In the early 2000s, enrollment in Pembroke’s schools had grown to the point that its school board contemplated building a second high school.
Luckily, it didn’t do so, because over the last two decades, the number of students in the town’s schools has steadily dropped — from almost 1,900 in 2005 to less than 1,300 now.
“My, how times have changed,” said Thomas Serafin, who served on the school board for over a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and now serves as the board’s moderator.
Earlier this month, school leaders presented a plan to reverse the trend. They argued that by adopting an open enrollment policy and actively marketing the district, they could attract as many as 324 students from other area towns over the coming years, boosting enrollment by as much as 25%.
This week, the roughly 75 residents in attendance at a special district meeting overwhelmingly approved the first phase of that approach. The vote to establish an open enrollment policy, which was conducted with index cards in the Pembroke Academy auditorium, appeared to be unanimous.
“It feels exciting,” Melanie Camelo, the chair of the school board, said in an interview following the meeting. “We know that we have good programs, we have good teachers in Pembroke, we have space for other students, and it might be the right fit.”
However, the move by Pembroke and other school districts might be moot. On Thursday, the state Senate fast-tracked a bill that would mandate open enrollment across the state, which would allow parents to send their children to the schools of their choice and force their home districts to pay for it.
The specter of unforeseen out-of-district tuition costs gained the attention of school officials rapidly.
At the beginning of this year, only two school districts in the state could accept students from other towns through the state’s open enrollment law.
However, a state Supreme Court ruling last fall clarified that districts are on the hook to pay when their students enroll elsewhere, even if the district where the student resides doesn’t have an open enrollment policy of its own.
The law allows districts that choose open enrollment to set limits on the number of students who can leave, providing a backdoor incentive for districts to choose such a policy to prevent a mass exodus and safeguard against unpredictable tuition bills.
Pembroke is the second district in the state this year, after Kearsarge, to establish an open enrollment policy. The school boards in 9 out of the 14 other districts in the capital region have added open enrollment warrant articles to their annual meeting dockets or indicated that they plan to do so.
Check out the Monitor’s tracker of open enrollment by district.
Even among neighboring districts, though, Pembroke’s approach stands out for two reasons.
First, rather than holding the vote during its annual meeting in March as other districts will do, Pembroke’s school board opted to hold a special meeting six weeks earlier. Camelo said scheduling the decision earlier will give district leaders time to prepare applications and other related procedures.
Second, rather than merely framing open enrollment as protection against students leaving, as other district leaders have, Pembroke plans to actively seek out new students. As a signal of that priority, Pembroke’s school administrative unit is restructuring an administrative position to include marketing responsibilities.
The new policy would allow up to 40 students from other towns to enroll in its elementary school, 80 students to enroll in its middle school, and 204 in its high school.
The district’s ability to attract new students will likely hinge in part on how open enrollment plays out at both the local and state levels.
Like Pembroke, other districts planning to adopt open enrollment policies have indicated that they will set the number of students who can leave at zero, as the law allows. If enough districts do this, it would create a scenario in which open enrollment exists in name only.
The bill in the state legislature would mandate statewide open enrollment and eliminate a district’s ability to cap students from leaving under the policy. It still needs to pass the House and be signed by Gov. Kelly Ayotte, an advocate of school choice.
Camelo said that while she supports parental choice in education, she believes unfettered open enrollment could be financially untenable for some districts.
“That could break a budget; that could break a school district,” she said.
The enrollment declines Pembroke experienced over the past two decades are slightly larger than the state has experienced as a whole. Public school enrollment in New Hampshire has decreased 22% since 2005, compared to 31% in Pembroke.
Regardless of what happens at the state level, Camelo said Pembroke has entered a new era.
“We’re going to have to market ourselves,” she said. “I do believe we’ll be okay, but it’s going to be very uncertain.”