Residents in at least three capital area school districts are set to vote early next year on whether to impose limits on the number of students who can attend schools in other towns through the state’s open enrollment law.
The votes in Pittsfield, N.H., Kearsarge and Pembroke, N.H., school districts will serve as the first local responses to a state Supreme Court ruling this fall clarifying that districts must pay tuition when their residents enroll at open enrollment schools elsewhere.
“They’ve made it quite clear down in Concord that open enrollment is here to stay,” Pembroke school board chair Melanie Camelo said in an interview this week. “We are trying to be proactive.”
Counterintuitively, in order to gain control over the number of students who can enroll at other institutions, voters must approve warrant articles that designate their own schools as open enrollment institutions. The law allows districts that adopt open enrollment policies to set both the number of students from other towns who can enroll in their schools and the percentage of students who can leave. Non-open-enrollment districts, meanwhile, have no say over the number of students who can enroll elsewhere.
Both Pembroke and Kearsarge have proposed setting the exiting percentage at zero, effectively blocking their students from enrolling in other districts. Pittsfield, which unsuccessfully challenged a Board of Education ruling that deemed it responsible for paying tuition for its students who had enrolled elsewhere, has not finalized its percentage, Superintendent Sandie MacDonald said.
If Pittsfield ultimately elects to bar any students from enrolling elsewhere, it is not yet clear whether it would remain on the hook for subsequent tuition bills to Prospect Mountain High School, the only open enrollment school in the state that currently has students from other towns.
Voters in Pittsfield, which had multiple students enroll at Prospect Mountain each of the previous two years, will also vote on whether to raise an additional $95,000 to cover tuition costs from 2023-24 and 2024-25. Regardless of whether or not voters approve the open enrollment warrant article, Pittsfield must pay the tuition because of the Supreme Court ruling, according to MacDonald.
The district, which has between 8 and 11 students enrolled at Prospect Mountain this year, is expecting to owe an additional tuition payment of roughly $152,000 for the 2025-26 school year, though it has not received a bill yet, according to MacDonald. Altogether, the three years of tuition are expected to come with a tax impact of $0.37 per thousand, or $111 on a property worth $300,000.
Some districts see the potential adoption of the open enrollment policy not only as a way to protect against the loss of students to other schools and the rising tuition bills that would result, but also as an opportunity to welcome some new students to their own schools.
At a meeting this week, Pembroke school board members and administrators discussed how many students they had the capacity to accept from other towns. High school Headmaster Derek Hamilton has begun doing outreach, and the district plans to hire someone who would be responsible for marketing, public relations and grant writing, Camelo said.
“We’re going to move slow, but with the resources already in place at our buildings, we’re hopefully going to have students come here,” she said.
The ultimate effect of the Supreme Court ruling on enrollment next year and beyond remains uncertain. Paradoxically, if most or all school districts adopt open enrollment policies and set their exit percentage at zero, it would effectively freeze the flow of students between districts.
School boards in Concord, Hopkinton, Bow and Dunbarton have yet to decide whether to proceed with open enrollment, school board members and administrators told the Monitor this week. The Shaker Regional School District has decided against it, and the Merrimack Valley school board has not discussed the issue, though “it probably can’t be ruled out,” board chair Tracy Bricchi said.
Franklin, which already had an inactive open enrollment policy, updated it last month, reaffirming that students can’t enroll elsewhere on the district’s dime.
The potential implications of open enrollment vary between school districts based largely on the resources they can offer students. More affluent districts, like Hopkinton and Bow, would conceivably gain students, while lower-income districts, like Franklin and Pittsfield, may lose them.
Concord, which has the largest high school in the area, has a history of working with other school districts already, primarily through the Concord Regional Technical Center. The high school has accommodated CRTC students who wish to enroll in certain other high school courses.
Pam Walsh, the president of Concord’s Board of Education, said the board will discuss open enrollment during its budget process early next year. Unlike most other districts, Concord does not have an annual meeting, and the adoption of an open enrollment policy will be up to the board.
While the board’s ultimate priority is the Concord district, Walsh said board members will also consider the ramifications for other districts, which could potentially lose students to the capital city.
“We want to ensure there are strong public schools across the region,” Walsh said.
Residents of the Kearsarge Regional School District will vote at their annual deliberative session on Jan. 10 at 9 a.m. at Kearsarge Regional Middle School, following a public hearing on Dec. 22 at 5 p.m. at the Kearsarge Professional Development Center.
Residents of the Pembroke School District will vote on their open enrollment warrant article at a special meeting on Jan. 27 at 6:30 p.m. in Pembroke Academy library, following a public hearing on Jan. 6 at 6:30 p.m. at the same location.