Merle DeWitt spends an extra 30-40 minutes in the car each day, toting his 16-year-old son, Gavin, to Prospect Mountain High School in Alton. The school is several towns away from their home in Epsom but it’s worth it to DeWitt .
He’d heard good reviews and scoped out its “very nice” facility before choosing to enroll Gavin outside of the Epsom School District. He’d also had concerns about Pembroke Academy, where most Epsom high schoolers attend, based on a former dean’s guilty plea to drug charges in 2018 and, more recently, budgetary issues. He also liked the Alton school’s smaller class sizes.
“It’s a little bit more of a commitment to get our sons there, but we felt as though Prospect Mountain offered more than what Pembroke Academy could offer,” DeWitt said in an interview.
But as Gavin spent the past two years attending Prospect Mountain, DeWitt has spent that time in a dispute with the Epsom School District on whether it is required to pay part of Gavin’s tuition.
On Thursday, the state Board of Education ruled in DeWitt’s favor.
State law allows open enrollment, where school districts like Prospect Mountain can vote to accept students from other localities. In that case, the “sending” school district, where the student is from, is supposed to pay 80% of its per-pupil tuition rate to the “receiving” district — but some argue they shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill for students who exit their hometown schools.
School districts get to decide whether to opt into the open enrollment program via a warrant article and can set limitations on the students who attend out-of-district schools. Jack Finley, the superintendent in Epsom, said in an email that his district hasn’t done that.
“Until it does so, the limit is zero and there is no obligation to pay tuition,” Finley said.
Prospect Mountain’s superintendent did not respond to a request for comment prior to deadline.
Complicating the case in Epsom is an Authorized Regional Enrollment Area, or AREA, agreement with Pembroke Academy. Nearby school districts that don’t have high schools, like Epsom, have agreed to assign their public school students to Pembroke Academy for ninth through twelfth grades. A lawyer for the Epsom School District argued that paying for a student to attend another high school could violate that agreement and put Epsom in “legal jeopardy.”
“If Epsom loses on that, then Epsom could end up paying twice for the same students — once to Prospect Mountain and once to Pembroke,” said Barbara Loughman, who represented Epsom at the hearing.
Even if the Epsom School District were to adopt a warrant article entering open enrollment, Finley said, it could be non-binding because of the pre-existing AREA agreement.
The state Board of Education directed Epsom to pay 80% of its cost per pupil to Prospect Mountain, which would be just shy of $14,000. Pembroke Academy’s cost per pupil was $17,463 for the 2023-24 school year, according to the Department of Education.
Finley declined to answer questions about whether Epsom would pay that tuition or appeal the board’s decision. The Pittsfield School District appealed a similar decision from the board and currently awaits a ruling from the state Supreme Court.
A New Hampshire judge weighed in on a separate open enrollment case on Thursday and limited the state Board of Education’s authority over some local situations, but did not conclude whether the state can require local school boards to enter tuition agreements.
Republican state lawmakers recently sought to make open enrollment mandatory with legislation that would’ve forced school boards to accept students from elsewhere in the state. Hesitation from some Republican senators stymied its progress this year, though they plan to revisit open enrollment in the coming years as one of several efforts to promote school choice in New Hampshire.
DeWitt views it as a win-win situation, where receiving schools get more students and sending schools only have to pay 80% of the money it costs to educate that student. And, his family likes Prospect Mountain so much that they plan to send their younger son there this fall for his freshman year of high school.
“Open enrollment was a great opportunity for us,” DeWitt said. “It gave us the opportunity to match our son and our student with a school that was better suited for him.”
Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.
