For more than a week, Republican Rep. Kristin Noble repeatedly tried to garner feedback from the governor about one of the most high-profile pieces of legislation this year.
Noble, the chair of a House education committee and one of the prime architects of the universal open enrollment bill, said she had previously enjoyed a strong relationship with the governor’s staff. But by last Tuesday, after the third attempt at outreach went unanswered, the Bedford lawmaker gave up.
“It was very obvious they did not want to communicate,” Noble said in an email to the Concord Monitor.
Two days later, she — and the rest of the state — finally received a response from the governor on the proposed legislation, which would have allowed students to attend any public school in the state with available space at no cost to them.
“That bill is not ready for primetime,” Ayotte said in a public statement.
The governor did not elaborate at the time, and her spokesperson did not respond to requests for explanation on her opposition or to multiple requests for an interview prior to this story’s publication.
While speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Ayotte did not specify her concerns but said she received feedback from school districts on “a number of issues.” Mainly, she said, she wanted more engagement with stakeholders and the public so it’s not “disruptive.”
She also balked at some of the last-minute changes, saying lawmakers ran out of time this session to get the major policy shift right.
“I think there just needs to be more work done. I do think that it’s not just work inside Concord,” Ayotte said. “It’s so important on something like this that the work happen outside of Concord, engaging the school districts, many of whom gave me feedback — and that engagement, to me, on a change like this, is important.”
Noble and the other lawmaker who has led the legislative effort on open enrollment, Republican Sen. Tim Lang of Sanborton, learned of the governor’s position the same way everyone else did: through a post on X by a reporter last Thursday afternoon.
By then, it was too late to negotiate. The lawmakers had just 80 minutes before this year’s deadline to submit amended bills. So late into the legislative session, bills could no longer be altered on the floor of the House or Senate.
The split between Ayotte and her party’s legislative leaders on universal open enrollment played out privately and then, suddenly, very publicly.
“I’m incredibly disappointed that her office refused to communicate with me and instead released that statement,” Noble wrote in response to questions. “…The way this was handled in no way reflects the working relationship I assumed we had.”
When the Monitor asked about these frustrations on Wednesday, Ayotte did not address lawmakers’ concerns that she had not been communicative with them.
The division is the latest example of rifts between the governor and Republican lawmakers on key pieces of legislation.
Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, attributed the collapse of open enrollment to Ayotte’s “go slow” approach to policy change: she acts swiftly on the issues she campaigned on — think public safety, the bail reform law and restoring pensions for law enforcement — but otherwise tends toward a more cautious style of governance.
“Open enrollment goes against Ayotte’s incremental nature as governor. Like, ‘We’ll move some things, yeah, but we’re not going to do anything too drastic, especially on things that aren’t priorities to me,'” Scala said. “Ayotte is willing to go big on things that are in her wheelhouse, whereas with education, I think she’s more inclined to be a bit more cautious.”
Open enrollment is Republicans’ latest attempt to further their vision of school choice in New Hampshire by expanding education alternatives beyond a student’s public school assigned by their zip code.
Ayotte ran on similar policies, like the universal expansion of education freedom accounts, though open enrollment could be viewed as a larger step, opening the floodgates with a new system for public school attendance.
Noble said the only private feedback she ever received from Ayotte on the open enrollment bill was communicated through House leaders earlier this spring. After lawmakers implemented a major change to the funding model for the policy in response to public criticism, Noble said she was told that the governor was concerned about how the state would afford the per-pupil payments, which would come from the education trust fund.
That concern prompted lawmakers to implement an enrollment cap, which would have limited participation in the program to 500 new students in its first year.
Noble said she met with members of the governor’s staff on May 5 to discuss several bills that were before her committee. During that meeting, she said she planned to address the fiscal uncertainty of the program by introducing the cap, but she did not get into specifics about the legislation or ask for feedback on whether the cap would appease the governor.
The amended bill was then introduced publicly two weeks later, on May 18. Noble said she reached out to the governor’s office the following day, and then again on May 21 and 26. She said she either received no response or was told that the staff was too busy to meet.
“I was either ignored or given the runaround,” Noble wrote. “Something that has never happened before. I have typically popped in to meet with staff when I need to and have always been welcomed. So this was very odd to me.”
Noble wrote that she “was fully prepared to pivot” on the bill if she had received feedback from Ayotte.
“With a little communication, we could have changed it hours or even days earlier, instead of minutes before the deadline,” she wrote.
Ayotte’s decision to make a statement at the eleventh hour was strategic, Scala said. Rather than let the legislation pass and issue a veto — a much stronger public response that can be overriden by lawmakers — Ayotte’s actions and their timing left the Legislature disgruntled but largely without recourse.
“Doing what she did is more just sort of running out the clock and letting it fizzle and betting that the Legislature won’t be able to get their act together and get something done,” Scala said.
After ultimately viewing Ayotte’s statement last week, a committee of Senate and House negotiators hastily reassembled following another meeting and scrapped their attempt to establish the new policy.
Instead, they introduced an amendment that would block school districts from prohibiting students from leaving under the current law, but not fundamentally change it. Noble said the amendment is designed to protect students currently enrolled in a school through open enrollment, but live in a district that capped participation at zero students earlier this year.
The House and Senate will vote on the final version of the bill on Thursday. Ayotte hasn’t said whether she would support it were it to pass.
During her first term, Ayotte has gone to the mat on several other disagreements with her party. Twice, she has vetoed bills that would’ve allowed the separation of bathrooms by biological sex rather than gender identity, a priority for many House and Senate Republicans.
Scala likened open enrollment to the dynamics at play with those so-called trans “bathroom bills” and Ayotte’s pledge not to further restrict New Hampshire’s abortion laws. She governs from the center-right, he said, whereas the Republican majority — particularly in the House — leans further to the right.
“Ayotte recognizes where the middle of the New Hampshire electorate is, and the middle of the New Hampshire electorate, at least when it comes to state and local politics, is fiscally moderate to conservative but socially moderate to liberal,” Scala said. “She bent over backwards to make clear to voters that she wasn’t going to govern as a social conservative.”
Lang, who has worked on open enrollment legislation since 2024, said he was frustrated by the process and still does not know what Ayotte’s specific concerns with the bill were.
“We thought we dealt with everyone’s concerns, thought we had a great bill moving forward,” Lang said. “And then to hear in the last hour that, nope, that one line from the governor with no context around it was rather frustrating.”
Despite frustrations from the GOP, however, Ayotte is unlikely to see any lasting internal backlash from her handling of open enrollment. Come November, the party will need her help to keep control of the House and Senate.
“‘If the Republican House majority is unhappy with me, so be it,'” Scala said, referring to the governor’s perspective. “If I’m Kelly Ayotte, I can live with that.”
