By GARRY RAYNO, InDepthNH.org
CONCORD — With a handful of days left in 2025, the Education Freedom Account Oversight Committee held its first meeting of the year Tuesday.
The committee decided to change its leadership, electing Sen. Suzanne Prentiss, D-Lebanon, as its new chair, replacing Rep. Ruth Ward, R-Stoddard, who had chaired the committee since its 2022 inception.
Ward has been an advocate for the EFA program, but Prentiss has been one of its critics, seeking greater oversight and greater financial reporting from parents of the program’s students.
Ward, earlier said House members’ schedules made it difficult to have enough members for a quorum this year.
After the meeting she released a statement saying, “The EFA program has become one of the most popular and successful school choice programs in the country. Unfortunately, Democratic opponents of school choice will continue to stand in the way of parents finding the best education for their children.”
In a draft report reviewed by the committee that was due Nov. 30, Ward also touted the program and awards issued by organizations advocating for school choice.
The program was originally touted as giving low-income parents educational alternatives for their children if they did not fit in the public school environment, but the program has largely served students who were not in public schools when they joined the program, but were in religious or private schools or homeschooled.
Sen. Debra Altschiller, D-Stratham, who was removed from the committee six weeks ago, said while the program was touted as helping low-income students, it has become a subsidy program for financially stable and thriving families.
Earlier this year the Republican-controlled Legislature removed any earnings cap from eligibility requirements, opening the program to any student in New Hampshire with no restrictions on parents’ wealth.
This school year — the first without any earnings cap — saw the enrollment almost double from 5,321 students during the 2024-2025 school year, to 10,510, and the cost increase from $28 million to $52 million.
The program is on course to be $28 million over the $87 million appropriated this biennium.
In the report written by Ward, she notes about half of this year’s enrollees are students in grades kindergarten to fifth grade, while middle and high school students are about evenly split for the remaining 50 percent.
“More than 83 percent of the EFA enrolled students meet the program’s priority status, defined as having been previously enrolled, be the sibling of an enrolled EFA student, have a disability, or be from a family earning 350 percent or less than the Federal poverty guidelines,” she writes in the report.
Committee member Rep. Peggy Belboni, D-Rye, suggested the oversight committee review how the priority status is determined and which areas are given priority. She also suggested the committee do ongoing assessments of the program and not just do an end-of-the-year report, which Prentiss said is her goal as well.
In her majority report, Ward notes that eliminating the income cap particularly benefited special education students whose numbers increased 136 percent.
The number of special education students enrolled this year is 890 which is 8.47 percent of the total enrollment and last year 435 students were enrolled which was 7.55 percent of that school year’s total enrollment.
EFA students do not have to go through the same qualifying process as do special education students in public schools, Balboni noted. A medical professional of any kind can qualify a child as disabled whether the student needs additional services or not under Department of Education approved rules.
If a child is qualified as disabled under the program, the student’s grant increases $2,185.
The percentage of students from low-income families has gone down since the program began with the 2021-2022 school year when it was 54 percent of the students.
The percentage of low-income students this school year is 19.19 percent, a precipitous drop from last year’s 39.22 percent.
Ward’s majority report also finds the EFA program has not reduced state public education funding, as the program draws from the Education Trust Fund, which also funds state aid to school districts as well as catastrophic special education aid and some school building aid.
The Education Trust Fund had a $250 million surplus several years ago, when state revenues were hundreds of millions in surplus but this fiscal year, the fund will be in deficit and will need state general fund dollars to meet its obligations.
“There is no evidence that increased participation in the EFA program has reduced state support for local school districts across New Hampshire,” the report says.
But Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, said they do not have the data to know how local school districts are impacted when students leave with a voucher.
She noted the town of Rindge has 29 percent of its students in the EFA, and they ought to determine how that has affected the school district, particularly when the phase-out grants end in July.
Damon also questioned how the program could be called successful and popular when 17 out of 17 communities this spring voted to ask their lawmakers to curtail the program and when the state does not have the assessment data to determine if the students are learning.
The majority report makes one recommendation that the Department of Education find a way to aggregate the EFA students’ annual assessment data in a way to protect student privacy and make it available.
The committee also seeks clarity if more than one organization is allowed to administer the program.
Currently the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH administers the EFA program as it does the business tax credit scholarship program, but the report notes since the organization was the sole bidder when the program began, other groups have expressed interest in being the program’s administrator.
Altschiller presented her minority report, which the oversight committee will review along with the majority report at another meeting before the legislature returns in January.
Altschiller said only 3.3 percent, or 343 out of 10,510 students, or “switchers,” left public schools to join the voucher program this school year, the remaining 96.7 percent were never in public schools nor receiving state tax dollars before they entered the EFA program.
“The stated purposes of the program has now gone far afield and has become a subsidy for families who were never enrolled in a local neighborhood school, public charter school or Virtual Learning academy program,” she said. “This is a clear indication that the program is not meeting its purported intended goals and instead has created a taxpayer-funded subsidy for financially thriving parents.”
She also said there is a growing cottage industry with the parochial school system of New Hampshire requiring applicants to secure NH Education Freedom Account or voucher money before submitting an application for financial aid to access the schools so they can continue to grow and flourish at taxpayer expense.
She said the money spent through the voucher program needs to be tracked to ensure it is used for educational purposes.
Altschiller said the money has been used to buy toys, summer camp stays and ski passes, all things not available to public school students.
“Growing the EFA voucher program does not save New Hampshire money,” she said. “Sending government subsidies to financially thriving families while the state is not meeting its constitutional obligation and court-ordered adequacy payments is neither responsible nor prudent.”
Prentiss said she hoped to have the committee report finalized at the next meeting and submitted before the end of the year.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.