A version of the following public comment was submitted to the Maryland Senate Committee on Education, Energy, and the Environment on February 27, 2026.
Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony on Senate Bill (SB) 350.
Strong open enrollment laws can benefit students and school districts. They ensure students can attend public schools that are the right fit for their goals and needs, with many using these programs to enroll in A- or B-rated school districts, escape bullying, access Advanced Placement (AP) courses and specialized learning models, enjoy smaller class sizes, or shorten their family commutes.
A report from the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office and a 2023 Reason Foundation study both found that the competitive effects of open enrollment also encourage public school districts to improve. In fact, when interviewed for a 2023 EdChoice report, public school district administrators in Arizona, North Carolina, Indiana, and Florida stated that open enrollment encouraged them to innovate by creating new programs and improving existing programs to better attract and retain students.
Research also shows that K–12 open enrollment is widely used and supported. Reason Foundation’s K–12 Open Enrollment by the Numbers: 2025 study found 22% of Delaware students and 28% of Colorado students in public schools used open enrollment to transfer and attend schools that were the right fit for them. Furthermore, according to a 2025 national poll by EdChoice, open enrollment is supported by 75% of school parents across party lines—80% of Republicans, 75% of Democrats, and 74% of independents—in favor of allowing families to attend public schools outside their assigned district’s boundaries. This bipartisan support led, in part, to open enrollment legislation being passed and signed into law in Idaho, Montana, and West Virginia (2023) and Nevada (2025).
Yet, as explained in this year’s edition of Public Schools Without Boundaries, Maryland is one of only four states that deprives students of any cross- or within-district open enrollment options, scoring a 0 out of Reason’s 100-point best practices criteria (an “F” letter grade). This leaves significant room for policy improvements across all seven key metrics that the study evaluates.
Maryland SB 350 is a first step toward filling that gap in public-school opportunities available to students, empowering families to match their children with schools that best fit their needs.
The bill would allow Maryland’s local county boards of education to adopt a cross-district open enrollment policy for enrolling students residentially assigned to other counties. Participating county boards would be prohibited from charging tuition or fees to such transfer students and would be required to determine and publish their program-related policies and transfer capacity (by school and grade level; updated every four weeks) on their website.
In doing so, the bill would make Maryland the 47th state to adopt an open enrollment policy and would improve the state’s related score (from a zero) to 44 out of 100 possible points on open enrollment best practices, surpassing states such as New Jersey and Virginia.
Even still, SB 350 leaves plenty of room for future improvement. Within-district open enrollment—allowing students to transfer between schools within their residentially assigned districts—should also be codified, and all districts should be required to accept within- and cross-district transfers so long as they have space available at the applicant’s grade level.
To ensure fairness, student transfer applications should be explicitly guaranteed equal consideration without regard to their economic background, abilities, or disabilities, preventing districts from discriminating. Moreover, districts should be required to inform rejected applicants in writing of the reasons for their denial, and those applicants should be permitted appeal of their rejection to the state board of education.
Lastly, the Maryland State Department of Education should be required to annually publicly report district-level open enrollment data (including the numbers of transfers accepted, applications rejected, actual transfers received, and why applicants were denied) to promote program accessibility, transparency, and accountability.