A Sudden Case of Open Enrollment
During cold and flu season, there are always signs that the whole family is going to get the same bug. It starts off with one of the kids having a dry cough or runny nose and, before you know it, the entire family is down for the count. Open enrollment has been similarly brewing as an issue in the educational funding landscape of New Hampshire for the past year, but it is suddenly on the verge of infecting our entire state thanks to the events of one day in the Senate this past week.
The short version of what is a lengthy parliamentary story is that SB101, a bill to allow any New Hampshire student to go to any public New Hampshire school, was passed by the Senate on Thursday, January 29th. Later the same day, the language contained in SB101 that addresses open enrollment was added as an amendment to HB751, an unrelated bill that had already passed the House and was up for a vote in the Senate. A divided Senate passed HB751 with the addition of open enrollment.
The passage of HB751, amended to include the language from SB101, will allow the open enrollment legislation to circumvent the normal public hearing process that SB101 would have had to face in the House, and will instead only require a yes/no vote on whether the House agrees with the Senate’s amendment, which it will in all likelihood do this Thursday, February 5th. Passing HB751 this quickly would leave more than enough time for Governor Ayotte to sign open enrollment into law before town meeting season.
Open enrollment has already been called out by local school leaders and organizations focused on education, as being one of serious concern to lower-ranked schools and the communities in which they are located. The open enrollment law would require towns to send away the local tax funding that comes from property taxes used to fund the students that leave their home district to go to a presumably higher-ranked school district. Decreased enrollment in these schools would lead to a higher cost per student which could then lead to school closure if enough students leave their district.
Open Enrollment and SAU 41 (Hollis-Brookline)
The Hollis-Brookline community is on the opposite side of the same coin, as it historically has had, and continues to have, one of the top school systems in New Hampshire. While a simplistic look at open enrollment would identify the additional educational money of other towns being sent to Hollis-Brookline, it’s hard to dismiss the existing issue of overcrowding.
Hollis Primary School, bucking statewide trends, is seeing consistent growth in enrollment and its school board has been working on plans for expansion, which we will vote on this March. The Hollis School Board has discussed overcrowding since 2023, but open enrollment started to become an issue in 2025, with multiple bills that went through the legislative process in Concord and, more importantly, the New Hampshire Supreme Court decision in the Appeal of Pittsfield School District that opened the door to open enrollment.
To address open enrollment locally, both the Hollis School District Warrant (Article 7) and the Brookline School Board Warrant (Article 6) contain language to limit it. Hollis-Brookline are far from the only school districts considering the effect of open enrollment this Spring. The issue before our community and others like it is that if open enrollment becomes law, like many are predicting it will, the new law will render those measures useless, as the state law would override any locally-passed warrant article and force open enrollment onto our schools.
Avoiding a school year where school districts get to decide for themselves whether open enrollment is right for their communities, is the most-likely reason for the speed that Republican legislators are moving at to pass HB751. While the parliamentary maneuvering used to pass HB751 this quickly is within the rules of how the House and Senate operate, a closer look might help to explain why this bill will likely be law in a matter of weeks.
A Closer Look at Passing SB101 and HB751
When SB101 was first introduced in the Senate over a year ago, it was far from a slam dunk proposition. Sign-in testimony against the bill was many multitudes greater than those who signed-in for the bill. In fact, the Senate Education committee unanimously recommended that it be referred to committee for further research, and the full Senate affirmed that recommendation. The committee subsequently voted unanimously in November 2025 to recommend the bill as Inexpedient to Legislate (ITL) i.e. that the bill shouldn’t pass.
This past Thursday, the ITL vote ended up failing when the full Senate voted on it, and a subsequent vote of Ought to Pass succeeded. The normal course of legislation would have the passed senate bill go to the House for its own round of public committee hearings and debate. Instead, later in the same session, Senator Lang offered a floor amendment to HB751, a bill having nothing to do with open enrollment, that was a copy of the open enrollment language from SB101. Because it was a floor amendment, it didn’t receive a public hearing, and it was passed with only Senate Republican votes.
Unrelated floor amendments, like this one, are permitted when the language has already passed. This type of legislative maneuver is common near the end of a legislative year when bills passed by the House, having been voted down by the Senate, are attached as amendments to other bills in order to get a second bite at the apple and potentially pass.
The procedure that controls this parliamentary process doesn’t even require public notice. You won’t find any mention that the House is voting on HB751 in this week’s House Calendar, which describes both sides of every bill being voted on that have come out of their respective committees. This is because amended Senate bills come back to the House as messages requesting concurrence that can be acted-upon immediately without public notice.
These opaque parliamentary techniques that Senate Republicans used are valid, but not typical of the average bill because they constructively obscure an aspect of the legislative process from public view and input. It should be clear that they were used to pass open enrollment and make the path to the Governor’s desk as short and as fast as possible.
Why Open Enrollment is Imminent for New Hampshire
The motive behind this toxic take on educational access can only be attributed to one group, and that is your Republican representation in Concord. The State Senate is controlled by Republicans 16-8, and the vote to pass HB751, with the open enrollment amendment, fell on party-lines.
How do we know that Republican State Reps will likely vote this through by concurring with the Senate amendment to HB751? Because they also have a strong majority in the House and, last year, passed HB741 (not a typo, seven forty-one), a bill that would “[allow] parents to send their children to public schools outside of their resident district,” which unsurprisingly contains language that is substantially similar, and is identical at times, to the language of SB101.
How do we know that Governor Ayotte, a Republican, will likely sign the bill into law should it pass the House? Open enrollment is being touted by Republicans at the State House as an extension of the expensive “choice” that their educational policy centers around, and Governor Ayotte signed an uncapped school voucher scheme into law last year in the name of school choice, a choice paid for at the expense of reduced state funding to our local schools.
Contact Your State Representatives
Again, there will be no public hearing before the House votes, so anyone who feels strongly that open enrollment will be disruptive to our schools, expensive for our communities, or an indication that education policy in New Hampshire continues to head in the wrong direction, should contact their State Representatives and urge them to not concur with the Senate-amended version of HB751 when the House votes on it this Thursday.
Having a large state legislature that represents the desires of the people while also enjoying the proximity we have to our elected officials comes with a cost, and vigilant action on our part, as voters, is the price we pay. We are fortunate that New Hampshire State Reps. are far easier to reach than in most other states, and that means that even when circumstances appear to be unchangeable, we must continue to speak up.