In 2025, New Hampshire legislators passed a law allowing students to enroll in any public school within their assigned district, as long as the school had room. This year, lawmakers might allow students to enroll in any New Hampshire public school that has room. This policy brief answers six core questions commonly raised about open enrollment.
Six common open enrollment questions, answered
- What is open enrollment?
Open enrollment comes in two forms. One (intradistrict, or within-district) allows students to enroll in any school within their assigned school district. New Hampshire adopted this policy last year. The other (interdistrict, or cross-district) allows students to enroll in any public school, regardless of the district. Cross-district open enrollment is often called “universal” because it allows students to choose any public school in the state. - Are there limits on how many students can transfer schools?
Yes. Open enrollment laws typically allow districts to reject transfers based on school capacity. How to define “capacity” varies. Some districts use school building capacity, others the student-teacher ratio, others the number of students in each grade, others the available spaces in a particular program. Both bills in N.H. allow capacity limits.
Building capacity is the simplest and fairest metric. Unlike the other metrics, it cannot easily be gamed or manipulated. Some states also set transfer deadlines so that students pick their schools at the start of the academic year.
- Is open enrollment a new idea?
No. Minnesota passed the nation’s first universal open enrollment law in 1988. This year, 46 states allow some form of open enrollment, though many place tight restrictions on transfers. Nearly half of the states (23) have strong statutes that allow most or all students to transfer to public schools of their choosing, according to the latest tally by the Reason Foundation, which also traced the age of state open enrollment laws.
In 1989, Iowa adopted cross-district open enrollment and Ohio adopted within-district. Colorado and Utah adopted open enroll-ment laws in 1990. Both states have within-district and cross-district enrollment. Washington state adopted a within-district policy in 1990. California has had a within-district open enrollment law since 1993. Arizona adopted both types in 1994, South Dakota followed in 1997, and Wisconsin adopted within-district open enrollment also in 1997. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more states have passed open enrollment statutes in response to families demanding options beyond their assigned school.
- Would universal open enrollment harm public schools?
On the contrary, universal open enrollment laws have been shown to improve student outcomes and spur improvements in poorer-performing public schools. Research from California, Ohio and Wisconsin has shown that competition between school districts can encourage them to improve.
In Wisconsin and California, small and rural districts bolstered their enrollments with transfers, showing how open enrollment can match students with available spaces in towns that have open seats and few children. Research from Colorado and Minnesota has shown that lower-performing districts tend to lose transfers at higher rates. Districts respond to competitive forces by seeking community input, then revising their programs based on that input.
California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote in its evaluation of that state’s District Choice Program, “home districts often respond to the program by taking action to gain clarity about the priorities of their communities and by implementing new educational programs. We also found that the home districts most affected by the program have made above-average gains in student achievement over the past several years, although the role of the program in these gains is difficult to determine.”
- Won’t districts that lose students just keep getting weaker?
No. Competition spurs improve-ments. As the California analysis above noted, districts that begin to lose students through open enrollment res-pond by making their districts more attractive to parents and students. This is a demonstrated effect when school choice programs reach scale. The New York Times confirmed this phenomenon in a story last year. The Times reported that school districts subjected to increased competi-tion responded by identifying their strengths and working to attract and keep students.
Researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, reviewing 41 empirical studies of competition in education, found “reasonably consistent evidence of a link between competition (choice) and education quality. Increased competition and higher educational quality are positively correlated.”
New Hampshire school boards are already being advised to improve their outreach to families in case universal open enrollment passes. “We need to start selling all the positive things that it [the district] has because at some point, we may have to compete for students,” Matt Upton, legal counsel for the Manchester School District, told the Manchester Board of School Committee’s Education Legislation Committee in late January, Manchester Ink Link reported.
- Would open enrollment explode the budgets of receiving districts?
No, for two reasons. First, strong open enrollment laws let districts reject transfer students based on capacity. Senate Bill 101 and House Bill 741, the open enrollment bills currently in the Legislature, do this. An enterprising school board might want to build a larger school or an innovative new program to attract students from other districts. But that decision would be their own. Second, the marginal cost of educating a new student is not the same as a district’s average per-pupil expenditure. Say that a district spends an average of $20,000 per student. That isn’t a hard $20,000 for each student. It’s the number that comes from dividing the district’s expenses by the number of students. If a school has empty classroom seats, adding one additional student does not cost an additional $20,0000. Adding one more student will cost some fraction of the average, depending on how large the school is and whether the student requires any special services.
As a rule, additional students bring surplus revenues until the number of new students reaches the point that new resources must be spent that exceed the amount of revenue those students bring in. Even then, an extra teacher who costs $85,000 a year would be paid for with just five additional students who bring in $20,000 each. The Reason Foundation analyzed the fiscal effects of HB 741, which sets transfer tuition at a base of 80% of a home district’s per-pupil cost, and estimated that districts would receive an average of $17,200 per transfer student.
Summary
Competition compels businesses to improve. Ample research shows that it does the same for school districts. Almost all states have some form of open enrollment, and 23 states have strong programs that create options for millions of students. Open enrollment uses market competition to match students with their preferred public school. It’s a school choice option that keeps students in public schools and encourages public school improvements. From 2002-2023, New Hampshire experienced the largest public school enrollment decline in the nation (18.4%), meaning that many seats are available for transfer students across the state.
Open enrollment would empower district public schools to better compete with Education Freedom Accounts, public charter schools and private schools. Open enrollment offers a way to strengthen public schools while simultaneously giving families more choices. It would do this without imposing new costs on schools. For these reasons, the adoption of universal open enrollment would be a win for students and public schools in New Hampshire.
Download this policy brief here: Open Enrollment Brief Jan 26.
