A Republican lawmaker plans to introduce a new funding model for universal open enrollment that closely mirrors that of charter schools, after an earlier proposal received pushback from school leaders and public education advocates.
Republican Sen. Tim Lang plans to introduce the amendment at a legislative hearing on Wednesday. The approach would rely on state funding through the Education Trust Fund rather than on direct tuition payments from school districts.
Under Lang’s proposal, when a student elects to enroll in a school district other than the one in which they reside, the state adequacy payments would follow them. The school district that enrolls the student would also receive an additional state-funded grant of roughly $5,000 per student.
“I realized that we already have a public school to public school transfer model,” Lang said in an interview. “So rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m just going to repurpose that exact funding model we use currently for charter schools and we’ll use it for open enrollment — the existing, vetted, tried funding model.”
Lang said the changes address concerns about the Senate’s passage of a bill in January that would have required individual districts to pay directly when their students leave and families to potentially chip in.
The state’s complicated funding formula makes comparing the financial impact of the two funding models on districts that lose students tricky, but in most situations, this state-funded approach would likely be advantageous to them. The exact math depends on the portion of exiting students who qualify for free and reduced lunch or have individualized education programs and the district’s equalized property valuation.
Low-income school districts, which receive additional state grant funding based on the number of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, could take a bigger hit from the loss of state aid than more affluent ones.
The universal open enrollment plan proposed by Lang would not go into effect until the 2027-28 school year, rather than before next school year.
The Concord Monitor obtained a draft of the new plan through a right-to-know request to the Department of Education. The draft is framed as an amendment to House Bill 751, but Lang said he will introduce an amendment to Senate Bill 101 at Wednesday’s hearing that is closely aligned with it.
In addition to changing the funding model and implementation timeline, the revised plan contains a number of other tweaks.
Lang said the amendment would clarify how school districts determine their capacity for new students. Capacity, he said, would refer to the number of students in a given grade that a school “can absorb before they would have to go hire another teacher.”
He said school boards would have the authority to set those capacity limits. The draft shared by the Department of Education doesn’t include a definition of “capacity”.
The plan would also clarify transportation requirements. Under Lang’s proposal, families of open enrollment students could only drop their children off at an existing bus stop in their new district if the stop has space for them.
Opponents of the previous school funding proposal who reviewed the new plan said that, while it was an improvement, they still believed underlying issues remained.
“I do think we’re taking some of the burden off of sending districts,” said Alexandra Tilsley, the director of policy at Reaching Higher NH, an organization that advocates for public education. “Part of it is the mechanics — they’re not getting a surprise bill anymore. They’re just getting less in adequacy.”
Still, Tilsley said the funding model will lead high-performing school districts to receive more money and districts that are struggling to lose funding.
Lang estimated that 1,500 to 3,000 students would participate in open enrollment in the first year — an additional cost to the state of $7.5 million to $15 million. Tilsley said her review of other state’s universal open enrollment programs suggests that participation could ultimately grow to roughly 7% of public school students, which would cost the state about $55 million per year.
“If we’re going to make an additional $55 million investment in public education, I’d love to see us invest in improving schools where students are, rather than forcing them to move to find quality education,” Tilsley said.
“It almost stopped me in my tracks to see a proposal that would significantly increase funding for public education, but do so by directing it to the schools that are already thriving,” she added.
A Department of Education analysis notes that low-income school districts that lose students could also lose additional target grant payments they receive due to their financial status. Mark Manganiello, the administrator of the department’s bureau of school finance, wrote in his analysis that the new open enrollment funding model could result in a “net savings” for the state, if those districts lose that funding.
The financial “impact will likely be minimal overall”, he wrote.
State lawmakers have voted down attempts to increase state funding for education in recent legislative cycles. They have failed to comply thus far with a Supreme Court order requiring the state to increase its adequacy payments to school districts.
“It is frustrating to see that there is a selective appetite for increasing funding for public education,” said Micaela Demeter, the organizing director at the advocacy organization NH School Funding Fairness Project.
Proponents of open enrollment have argued that the policy would increase competition between school districts, which would improve educational opportunities for students.
“On a per pupil basis, the state gives more and more [money] every year,” Lang said. “If we’re giving more money and then they’re saying, ‘Well, not enough; we need even more,’ they need to refocus on how they’re doing, especially if they’re losing pupils.”
The new proposal is set to be introduced weeks after districts across the state passed restrictive open enrollment policies during their municipal elections and at annual meetings. Those policies, which follow the current open enrollment law, prevent students from enrolling in another district at their home district’s expense.
Assuming the universal open enrollment law doesn’t go into effect until 2027, those laws would remain in effect next school year. Until then, school districts that did not pass restrictive open enrollment laws will be on the hook for tuition costs when their students enroll elsewhere.
Currently, roughly 30 students attend a school outside their district through open enrollment. All of them attend Prospect Mountain High School in Alton.