By GARRY RAYNO, InDepthNH.org
CONCORD — Down party lines, the House Finance Committee Wednesday voted to approve opening the Education Freedom Account to any student regardless of the parental income.
The program, originally touted as providing low-income parents whose children did not fit into the public school environment with a pathway to alternative educational opportunities, currently has about 5,300 students and costs about $30 million this school year.
The House Finance Committee voted 14-11 to approve expanding the program to universal access with an initial cap of 10,000 students, which could be increased by 25 percent if enrollment approaches the cap.
Senate Bill 295 would also exempt siblings of currently enrolled students, disabled students and students whose parents earn less than 350 percent of the federal poverty level — the current income threshold — from the enrollment cap.
Supporters of the bill said the program will not grow as fast, nor become as expensive as opponents say, but will provide a minority of students opportunities to thrive, when they cannot in public schools.
Rep. Daniel Popovici-Muller, R-Windham, said he would like to see the $4 billion spent on public education under the same scrutiny as the tens of millions they are trying to spend on those who are not properly served by public education.
“We are locking them out of the system and we are telling them they have one choice and it does matter how much it does not work for you, you will like it,” he said. “That is not how we should do policy in this state.”
He noted he served on his community’s school board and tried to improve the system, noting the legislature last year increased public education funding by $193 million.
“We are arguing over comparatively tiny amounts of money that help that population we are not properly serving in the public schools,” Popovici-Muller said. “Public schools are great for the majority of people in this state, but we care for the rights of minorities, we care for everybody’s rights equally and this is the point of this bill.”
But opponents argued the time is not right to expand a program that has few guardrails, lacks accountability and proper oversight, when the committee spent months cutting state departments and eliminating others like the Arts Council because of fiscal constraints.
Rep. Laura Telerski, D-Nashua, said the committee spent weeks digging into the budget making some really hard choices that no one was happy about.
“What we did was we made it harder to access healthcare by raising costs, there was no new money for housing, there was no attempt to solve the child care crisis that currently exists, we made getting healthcare more expensive and more difficult (to access),” she said. “We didn’t lower costs for Granite Staters or help people, yet here we have this bill.”
If they approve the bill, Telerski said, they will be saying they want to send more money and they want to give it to people who make more money than the people they are passing the cost down to.
“That is really disappointing,” she said, “when we should be tightening our belts as we are telling every department to do.”
Telerski said it would be irresponsible to pass the bill.
The House bill to expand the EFA program included increasing the income cap to 400 percent for the next school year — $84,600 for a household of two, $128,600 for family of four — and then removing any threshold for the 2026-2027 school year.
The House approved budget includes $36 million for the program in fiscal year 2026 and $55 million for fiscal year 2027.
The change to universal access in 2026 would increase spending by $16.8 million according to estimates from the House Education Funding Committee.
Rep. Mary Hakken-Phillips, D-Hanover, told the committee “We don’t have a plan to pay for that right now. It’s never been a practice of this committee to advance such a large amount of money after cross over.”
Rep. David Luneau, D-Hopkinton, said the potential state costs are much higher than those projections.
He said the current program with 5,300 students cost the state $30 million, and with a cap of 10,000 students it is likely to cost another $30 million next school year making it $60 million and with a 25 percent increase that is an additional $15 million.
He said currently there are 160,000 students in public schools, 15,000 kids in private schools, 4,000 in homeschools and according to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute, another 20,000 students between kindergarten age and 12th grade that are not in public, private or homeschools.
Luneau said that means potentially about 40,000 school-age kids could receive a $6,000 grant under the voucher program for a maximum exposure of $240 million.
“I am not saying everyone of them will absolutely take a voucher,” he said later, “but that would be an exposure to the state.”
But Popovici-Muller said those figures are not realistic, that his subcommittee used the experience from other states who went to a universal voucher program and the number of students would be far less. His subcommittee used estimates done by Drew Cline, the president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy and an advocate for universal access to the EFA program.
However, some states that went to universal programs are facing budget shortfalls, some significant such as Arizona where last year it faced over a $1 billion deficit, almost all of it from its voucher program.
North Carolina is another state facing a significant shortfall largely due to its universal voucher program.
Luneau also took aim at the accuracy of the information used to accept students into the program by the program manager Children’s Scholarship Fund NH.
He said a comprehensive performance audit on the EFA program by the Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office is expected before the end of the year and suggested the committee wait for that before expanding the program.
Luneau noted a compliance check by the Department of Education of 50 applications from the first two years of the program found that 25 percent did not contain the required information for eligibility including one student from out of state.
Other opponents noted despite claims of popularity, when the issue was put before 19 communities at town meetings this year, those communities all voted to urge the legislature not to expand the program including heavily Republican Weare by better than a two-to-one margin.
After the vote, the President of the National Education Association NH, Megan Tuttle, said the state needs to focus on the majority of students who are in public schools when state finances are tight as they are now.
“Granite Staters overwhelmingly believe every student deserves access to quality public education, regardless of their zip code,” Tuttle said. “Instead of listening to their constituents and fully funding public schools that are attended by nearly 90 percent of students, anti-public education politicians continue to push their budget-busting universal voucher proposal.”
“I want to be very clear — any vote to expand New Hampshire’s voucher program is a vote to take more public dollars out of public schools to subsidize private education.”
She said educators and families are speaking out against efforts to eliminate income eligibility requirements for these private school handouts for a select few because they know the cost comes at the expense of items that support all our students, including special education funding and health care for children.
“Make no mistake, hard working New Hampshire taxpayers will foot the bill for this giveaway,” Tuttle said.
The bill could come to the House floor as early as next week.
If approved, the bill would need to go back to the Senate because of changes the House made.
The move to universal vouchers next fiscal year, is not what Gov. Kelly Ayotte proposed in her budget plan.
She retained the current 350 percent of poverty threshold for the 2026 fiscal year, and then removed the cap, but students entering the program would have to have spent one year in public schools before they would be eligible to join the program.
No such restriction is in either the House or Senate bills making the program universal.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.