What if the open enrollment cap looked more like the voucher cap?

May 22nd, 2026

Notes from the Margins:

An amendment being considered by the HB 751 Committee of Conference proposes to cap initial use of open enrollment at 500 students, with the cap growing annually, assuming there is demand. 

On its surface, the cap mirrors the enrollment cap on the Education Freedom Account program, but there is a key difference in how it will be administered. For the EFA program, prospective families apply through the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, and spots are awarded to qualifying families if they are available. Students in priority groups – those who were already enrolled in the program or who have a sibling enrolled in the program, those from low income families, and those with disabilities – are prioritized, and can be awarded an EFA even if the program has already met its cap. 

For the proposed open enrollment cap, the limit will functionally be applied to available seats, not to student enrollment. The draft bill text defines “statewide enrollment cap” as “the total number of pupil seats approved by the department of education.” The Department is instructed to “adopt procedures to allocate and authorize seats for statewide open enrollment in a manner that ensures equitable geographic distribution and fair access for students across all regions of the state.” This means that, functionally, the limit in the first year is not necessarily 500 students, but 500 seats. Whether those seats are in places that families want to and can reasonably access will play a role in determining whether enrollment meets the cap. 

Importantly, the annual increase to the cap is based on students, not seats. The bill says that if the total number of students enrolled in open enrollment is more than 90% of the cap, the cap increases by 25 percent. If the cap does not increase for 2 consecutive years, it is removed. The EFA program contains the same automatic escalation clause, but both the cap and the threshold to trigger an increase are based on student enrollment. 

You could imagine, with open enrollment, a scenario where 500 seats are available, but enrollment does not meet that 90% threshold because the seats are geographically distributed, and don’t necessarily match where families might want to go. When the cap is removed, use of the program – and associated costs – could increase dramatically. 

Of course, any increase assumes that districts have seats they wanted to offer to open enrollment students but that weren’t authorized by the state. Use of the program could naturally be limited by districts’ capacity. This year’s warrant articles gave us some insight into which districts might be interested in enrolling open enrollment students and at what level, but those warrant articles were based on a different financial model. How much the new proposed model, and the requirement that every district adopt a policy, will change districts’ interest in open enrollment is impossible to say.

Another consequence of capping seats and not students is that, unlike in the EFA program, there is no preference for students from low-income families or any other student group. While districts are allowed to preference siblings of current students or children of employees, there is no mechanism for ensuring that the 500 open enrollment seats are going to students who might need them more than others. Given that open enrollment has been pitched as a way to ensure equitable opportunity regardless of zip code, you could imagine wanting to prioritize students at lower-performing schools, students who have been at their school for at least a year and determined it is not a fit, or students from lower income families who simply might lack the means to move to the school district in the nearby property wealthy town. But prioritizing those groups for the 500 seats would require a centralized, statewide application process – likely a nonstarter. 

The legislature could also give districts the latitude to prioritize these groups in their district policies. From the receiving district perspective, the revenue is the same regardless of where the student is coming from, though there may be other reasons school boards choose not to prioritize these groups. Still, if the goal of open enrollment is to increase opportunity, and if the program is going to be limited – a wise step to limit costs and disruption – it would be logical to try to find ways to ensure the program is reaching those with the most limited access to opportunity now. 

Of course, even offering a preference for students from low income families or those from lower wealth towns does not change the fact that many students will not be able to access open enrollment simply because their families can’t drive them to another town every day. The best way to increase access to opportunity would be to take the money the state would spend on open enrollment and instead direct it to the schools that lack the resources to offer the opportunities their students deserve.

 

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