HB 751 started out as a bill about licensure for outpatient substance abuse facilities, but because legislatures are a wacky bunch of folks, an amendment was just added to turn it into a bill about open enrollment.
The old open enrollment law allowed school districts to opt in, and for years, only one district has done so. But it does also allow districts to block students from leaving, and apparently the legislatures is fast tracking the new bill to get ahead of the annual meetings where such local decisions could be made.
The new version of open enrollment would be mandatory for all districts.
Any student could choose any school in any district for any reason. Districts are allowed to set their capacity and, having done so, reject students for whom they have no space. Districts could also deny a transfer because the student had been expelled, the student had a documented history of significant disciplinary issues, or the student had a history of chronic absenteeism. Also--
What happens if the sending and receiving districts have different per-pupil spending amounts? What if my kid wants to leave East Egg High School where they spend $10K per year on him and go to West Egg High, where they spend $20K per pupil? The sending district only has to pay their own per pupil amount as tuition; if there is a difference, the parents have to make it up. So if I want to send my kid to West Egg, I have to kick in $10K myself.
What if a West Egg student wants to come to East Egg? I'm not sure anyone is seriously expecting that to happen, but if it did, the bill says sending schools pay not less than 80% of their rate, so the West Egg taxpayers would pay $16K.
Schools can offer tuition rate "bargains," and a school "may receive financial aid, private gifts, grants, or revenue."
There are numerous problems with the proposal. For one, it absolutely kicks local control in the teeth. Districts would face major financial decisions that they could neither predict nor control. I would expect many districts would simply set their capacity in a way that allowed for very few transfers in.
But as writer Garry Rayno points out, there are other problematic effects over time. The most likely effect is to drain poor districts and make their taxpayers donors to wealthier districts. Analysis by Reaching Higher NH argues that as sending districts send more pupils, their cost per pupil will grow, because the law says transfer students will be used to compute Average Daily Members in Residence. Actually, the law would get really confusing because the state uses Average Daily Members in Residence and Average Daily Members in Attendance to compute different formulas, and those two numbers would be increasingly different, because the state will count transfer students in ADMR counts, but not ADMA.
So to simplify. Let's say East Egg has 100 students and spends a million dollars on students, and ten of them head off to West Egg. Now the district has 90 students--but because it's paying the tuition of those ten transfer students it still spends a million on students, but now that is spread over 90 students. Cost per pupil goes up. Meanwhile, the cost-per-pupil in the receiving school goes down, and the stranded costs remain (losing ten students doesn't allow East Egg to cut buses or heating, maybe not even staff).
This is just such a complicated mess. Sending students to neighboring districts is not unheard of in the state, but that has historically involved a sending district that does not operate its own schools (you may recall a huge dustup over this very issue in tiny Croydon, NH). Opponents warn that this bill sill simply result in a reverse Robin Hood situation, with poor districts losing funding and facing the choice of either cutting expenses or raising taxes, which is itself a mess because New Hampshire is already under a court order to fix a bad school funding system that leans to heavily on local taxes to fund schools.
School superintendents-- including those whose district would likely be a winner-- oppose the bill, citing budget headaches. Meanwhile, school choice fans make the same old argument that it would allow students to escape struggling districts, as if this would not leave the majority of students behind in a district that would be facing even more struggles due to lost revenue. It'll encourage improvements to compete for students, say the choicers, even though that's just not howe it works.
And of course, like most choice programs, this would strip local taxpaying voters of local control. Your neighbor sends their kids to a different district, and your taxes go up, argue superintendents.
The bill was supposed to be on a fast track; we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, John Sheas, superintendent of schools for Somersworth School District, seems to have a pretty good grasp of which way the wind is blowing among Granite State legislators. The bill, he says, "could be the knockout punch for universal public education" in New Hampshire. Noting the chromic underfunding issue, he goes on to write
On top of all this has been a decades-long effort to undo the very premise of universal public education. Rather than a system built and maintained together (federal, state governments, and local communities) aimed at educating all of our kids for the greater good of our communities and nation — they’ve sought to replace it with a private marketplace narrative. Education is an “every man, woman, and child for themselves” endeavor — not a public good. The NH school voucher program (a.k.a. Education Freedom Accounts) has fit this narrative perfectly and done even more damage to struggling school systems. It seems only a matter of time before we offer vouchers (or tax rebates) to those among us who don’t plan to use police services, the fire department, or local roads. No?
No, indeed.
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