This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
In 2015, before school choice emerged as one of the more contentious education issues, Franklin became the first district in the state to adopt an open enrollment program.
The move allowed students who lived outside Franklin to enroll and attend classes in city schools. District leaders hoped it would provide an enrollment and revenue boon after an agreement lapsed to receive students from the town of Hill at the middle and high school.
At first, some Hill students took advantage of the opportunity to remain in their old schools, Superintendent Dan LeGallo said. But when they graduated, new students failed to materialize and the program went dormant.
A decade after Franklin started its program, a major state Supreme Court decision last month has turned open enrollment from a fiscal lifeline to an existential threat, some superintendents of lower and moderate-income school districts worry.
The Supreme Court clarified a significant point of dispute, ruling that the school district where a student resides must pay a share of the tuition for any student who enrolls elsewhere, even if the home district has not agreed to be an open enrollment school itself.
The decision, coupled with proposed legislation that would mandate every district to adopt an open enrollment policy, could upend how public education operates in New Hampshire. Traditional public schools, which have increasingly been pitted against private and charter schools, could now be forced to compete with each other for students, as well.
While proponents of open enrollment argue that competition will breed better educational outcomes for students overall, low-income districts will likely suffer, some superintendents and experts say.
“The fact of the matter is: as innovative as we are, and as creative as we’ve been and what we’ve done here, we still have the economic barriers,” LeGallo said, citing low teacher pay in Franklin, which has the third-highest percentage of economically disadvantaged students in the state.
“So when we look at those disparities, families will still choose to send their kids to wealthier districts where teachers are paid higher salaries, and we don’t have a solution to that,” he said.
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law means that any time a student’s family chooses an open-enrollment school, the district where that student lives is responsible for paying 80% of its average cost per pupil in tuition. Because the loss of a student doesn’t typically come with a corresponding reduction in expenses, LeGallo and his counterparts worry it will strain their already-tight budgets.
Pittsfield, the school district that appealed a Board of Education ruling to the Supreme Court, may be forced to consider closing its high school entirely, according to a legal brief filed by the district’s lawyer late last month. (Pittsfield’s superintendent, Sandie MacDonald, declined to comment for this story, because she wanted to discuss the ruling’s implications with her school board first.)
The changing landscape also poses a dilemma for school districts in less dire financial straits. Should they become open enrollment schools themselves and attempt to attract students from nearby districts? Or should they sit tight and watch what happens at the risk of falling behind?
“This is a very, very tumultuous sandbox that we’re playing in right now, in terms of how these decisions are playing out around us,” Kearsarge Regional School District Assistant Superintendent Michael Bessette said at a board meeting last month.
A test case
When the Alton and Barnstead school boards hired Timothy Broadrick to serve as their superintendent in 2019, they wanted him to address declining enrollment at their high school, Prospect Mountain.
Opened in 2004, the school had peaked at around 550 students before shrinking to about 470 by 2019, Broadrick said. After being hired, Broadrick conducted an enrollment projection which suggested that, without any action, enrollment would drop further — to 365 students by 2028.
After trying and failing to negotiate tuition agreements to receive students from neighboring school districts, Broadrick happened upon a somewhat arcane 2009 law that allowed school districts to accept students from other communities. At the time, the law had only been harnessed once – by Franklin – and many questions remained, particularly about how tuition sharing would work when students residing in a district that hadn’t agreed to open enrollment chose to attend another school.
Broadrick and school board members hoped that their adoption of the statute could prompt clarification.
“There’s something a little strange – I want to say silly even – about having a law on the books for 15 years just about, but not being able to use it, because nobody’s totally clear on how it works and what it means,” Broadrick said in an interview. “So when my school boards made the decision to go to our legislative bodies about this, it was very openly, very honestly to give the state a reason to figure it out.”
In the first year, 2022-23, about 10 students from outside Alton and Barnstead enrolled at Prospect Mountain High. The next year, 20 did, and this year, about 30 have, according to Broadrick.
Last month, Prospect Mountain got its desired clarification after Pittsfield – which has up to 11 students enrolled at Prospect Mountain this year – lost its appeal of a Board of Education decision ordering it to pay tuition despite not being an open enrollment district.
Responding to the order
The Supreme Court’s order establishes a precedent for the state at large, which has prompted superintendents and school boards to spend the weeks since the ruling considering what to do next.
A quirk in the law could push some districts toward joining Prospect Mountain as open enrollment schools. Doing so grants the schools the power to set not just the number of students they will accept, but also the percentage they will allow to leave. The latter figure could theoretically be set to zero, prohibiting student exits.
Superintendents said they see three options: do nothing; adopt the open enrollment framework in name only so that they can ensure no students leave; or follow in Prospect Mountain’s footsteps and embrace open enrollment wholesale.
“We have many districts in New Hampshire that have had declining enrollments the last couple of decades,” said Barrett Christina, the executive director of the state’s school boards association. “I think some of those districts may welcome open enrollment in an effort to try and fill their seats and to generate revenue.”
“Conversely, though,” Christina added, “there are going to be districts, such as Pittsfield, that are worried about losing students, so they may implement open enrollment provisions, … but place limits on the numbers of students going out.”
The superintendents interviewed – who collectively lead Franklin, Concord, Allenstown, Chichester and Epsom – said their boards had not come to a decision yet. Adopting the open enrollment provision would require a warrant at the annual meeting for the districts that hold them.
School leaders must consider not only the anticipated benefits or drawbacks of changes to their enrollment, but also the budget-setting implications. Districts begin planning their budgets in the fall of the preceding year, long before students must make their enrollment decisions.
“As boards try to plan for the amount of students they need to serve, it’s going to be a challenge if they don’t know who they need to serve,” said Jack Finley, the superintendent of the Allenstown, Chichester, and Epsom school districts.
Many school districts’ decisions will likely involve an assessment of where they rank among their peers in terms of resources, programmatic offerings, and size, comparisons that Broadrick believes will ultimately benefit public education.
“Over the last 30 years, there’s a greater expectation of choice and differentiation in schooling,” he said, “and if public schools aren’t ready to become a part of that, then I think we just continue to watch students leave and take advantage of other things.”
Christina, in contrast, predicts that open enrollment will only exacerbate inequality and questions whether it will ultimately benefit students.
“Further competition assumes that we’re all trying to win,” he said. “Public education is not about winning. It’s about providing services to students – oftentimes our most vulnerable students – in an effort to help them become better educated and become better citizens.”
In Concord, a large middle-income school district that might prove desirable to students from neighboring towns, interim Superintendent Tim Herbert said he is focused on working together with area districts despite the headwinds of competition that open enrollment could spur.
“There’s some things, clearly, that Concord High School can provide that some communities can’t,” Herbert said. “But we have regional relationships already through several different professional organizations, through our regional CTE center, and we have always worked collaboratively across the region whenever something’s changed in the landscape to figure it out and navigate it together.”
Herbert said he’s met with other area superintendents since the Supreme Court ruling to discuss how to proceed, but he said the group has yet to make any collective decisions.
Unanswered questions
In an education system where students increasingly enroll in schools based on fit rather than geography, questions will arise about transportation, special education services and athletics, among other things.
Open-enrollment schools are not required to provide transportation to students who live outside their school district. Some superintendents say this raises equity concerns about access.
“Let’s be honest,” LeGallo said, “if you don’t have transportation to take your kids to another town, they can’t take advantage of open enrollment.”
It is also not entirely clear which district is responsible for special education costs. Christina, the director of the School Boards Association, said the “long-standing interpretation” has been that the responsibility remains that of the student’s home district, though the open enrollment law doesn’t address that issue directly.
Also up in the air is how open enrollment affects existing agreements between school districts. Some districts, particularly those without high schools, have legally binding agreements requiring that their students attend a specific school in another district.
The towns of Allenstown, Epsom and Chichester, for example, participate in an AREA (authorized regional enrollment area) agreement with Pembroke. Finley, the superintendent of those districts, believes that ambiguity in the Supreme Court ruling could potentially put his districts on the hook to owe double tuition for each student who enrolls in a school like Prospect Mountain – one bill to the open enrollment school and another to Pembroke Academy.
The state Board of Education previously ruled against Epsom on this issue, but the district has asked the board to reconsider. Their request is scheduled to be heard on Thursday.
“We’re trying to protect the residents of the districts that have not opted to participate in an open enrollment agreement,” he said.
Charlotte Matherly contributed reporting for this story.
