Since 2009, districts in New Hampshire have been allowed to participate in open enrollment. Very few, if any, have opted to do it. Suddenly, there are four bills this year to mandate for all districts what almost none of them seem to want.
Under mandated open enrollment, public schools will be required to publish how many open seats they have, and any student from any district can attend any public school — inside or outside their district — if space is available. The sending district will pay some amount of money to the receiving district — although not even the sponsors of the bills seem to know how that amount will be calculated.
This sounds great in theory for kids who are stuck in schools that aren’t well-suited to them. But will it work in practice, even for those kids? And how will it affect everyone else?
The argument put forth in favor of open enrollment is that low performing schools will lose students, who will then help high-performing schools fill their empty seats. Low performing schools that lose lots of students will likely close, sending the remaining students somewhere else. Students will get a better education, and we’ll save tons of money.
But we don’t have to guess what will happen. As a case study, let’s look at Newport. Between 2007 and 2025, their enrollment dropped by 27%, from 1,115 students to 819. If we accept the rhetoric put forth by advocates of Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs), Newport’s budget should also have dropped by 27%.
But that’s not how this story goes. In 2016, Newport closed one of its schools, which housed 5th and 6th grades. They moved 5th grade to the elementary school and 6th grade to the middle school. Fewer students in fewer school buildings should have translated to less spending, right?
For the five years preceding the change, the district budget had remained stable at about $17 million, despite decreasing enrollment. Immediately after the change, the budget started to climb — passing $20 million in 2020. The budget never went down, at any point, for any of the anticipated reasons.
All of New Hampshire has seen declining enrollments with corresponding increases in district budgets. That’s whole budgets, not per student costs. Newport closed an entire school and ended up with a higher (and more quickly growing) budget.
Wishful thinking suggests that lowering enrollments, and even school closures, will lead to reduced costs. But experience shows that just the opposite is true.
So how will all this be funded? Each of the four bills contains this sentence:
The pupil’s resident district shall pay to such school an amount equal to not less than 80 percent of that district’s average cost per pupil.
But what does “that” mean? Does the sending district pay 80% of the sending district’s per-student cost, or 80% of the receiving district’s per-student’s cost? I asked some of the bills’ sponsors which which district “that” refers to. One agreed that it was unclear, and another said the intent is the sending district. While the House already passed one of these bills without noticing the ambiguity, the language should be clarified.
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Either way, according to HB 771, the 80% rule applies, but this bill also says that a district can “choose” to accept students from other districts, which means that the program would continue to not be mandatory for all districts.
According to HB 741, the 80% rule applies, but it says that the program would be mandatory for all districts.
According to SB 101, payments will be 100%, rather than 80%, and it says that the program would be mandatory for all districts.
HB 2 is just like SB 101, but it’s been folded into the state’s budget bill, making it the one most likely to pass.
What is the average cost per student? It’s simply a calculation. Average cost per student is not how much is spent on each student. If one student leaves the district, the total budget doesn’t change, and in fact, the per student cost will go up. It’s just math.
The idea that ‘money follows the student’ is simply not true. When the sending district pays for a student to go to another district, the sending school’s budget goes UP by that amount. It is additional tuition that they did not have to pay before. They don’t get to “keep” the remaining 20%.
I am personally very interested in how this will affect tuitioning towns, like the one I live in. When a district doesn’t provide all the grades, it is allowed to pay tuition to public schools in other districts or to private schools for the remaining grades. There are about 30 tuitioning towns in NH.
My town — Croydon — provides a K-4 school for 22 students, and tuitions out 66 students in grades 5-12. Croydon sets a cap for the tuition it will pay, and the parents have to pay anything above that. So far, only Kimball Union Academy has charged more than the cap.
Currently, Croydon sends more than half of its tuitioned students to Sunapee district schools, and pays around $17K in tuition per student. However, with open enrollment, if it has to pay 100% of Croydon’s per-student cost, that would come to $24K. So its budget will jump. Or, if it has to pay 100% of Sunapee’s per-student cost, that would come to $33K. So its budget will skyrocket.
Croydon also sends students to Claremont ($23K per student) and Newport ($21K per student). Tuition will go up for all of them.
Note that if the clarified bill ends up saying that the sending district pays 80% or 100% of the sending district’s per-student cost, it would mean that a receiving district would be collecting different amounts of tuition for each student, which is a hell of a way to run a railroad.
In summary, if any of these open enrollment bills is enacted into law, every school district budget will go up, none will go down, and even the schools being abandoned will end up costing more. I think everyone agrees that the way we fund schools in NH is a problem. But this isn’t the solution.
