CONCORD — After voting to cut off debate on the latest Education Freedom Account expansion bill, the House Republican majority approved a bill that would do away with an income cap beginning July 1.

Under the bill, there would be a 10,000 student cap on the program that has grown in four years from 1,635 students to about 5,400 students and in cost from $8 million to over $30 million.

Currently there is an income cap of 350 percent of the federal poverty level — or $112,525 for a family of four — on the program that would be eliminated next school year under Senate Bill 295, which the House passed Thursday.

House Bill 115, which is now before the Senate, would eliminate the cap beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, and would have a cap of 400 percent next school year, or $128,600 for a family of four.

Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney, R-Salem, moved the previous question as the bill came to the floor which cuts off debate on the issue.

The House has debated the issue at length this session and in the past, he said.

But Rep. Laura Telerski, D-Nashua, opposed the motion saying the issue of school vouchers is extremely important to the public and voters want to hear what their representatives have to say about it, and urged her colleagues to vote against “the silencing of the debate.”

But the House voted 185-155 to cut off debate before it began.

Under the bill, if enrollment in the program reaches 90 percent of the student limit, the cap would be increased by 25 percent or to 12,500 the following school year.

The bill also sets up a priority system if the cap is reached before the expansion.

The priorities would be:

1. Student currently enrolled in the program,

2. Sibling of an enrolled student,

3. Student with disabilities, and

4. Student with family income less than 350 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.

Rep. David Luneau, D-Hopkinton, tried to amend the bill to require a performance audit currently being done by the Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office, be completed and the organization administering the program have “a clean bill of health” before there could be any expansion of the program.

He noted a sample audit several years ago found that 12 out of 50 applications were approved in error by the Children’s Scholarship Fund that administers the program.

The amendment would force the company to comply with “The laws and rules we have passed in this body and to take what we are doing seriously,” Luneau said.

But House Education Funding Chair Rep. Rick Ladd, R-Haverhill, called the amendment another trap and delaying tactic to implementing the EFA program, noting no date has been set for the audit’s release.

And he said most performance audits are 120 pages with many findings that would have to be resolved before the program could be expanded.

The amendment was defeated on a 199-165 vote.

Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, urged her colleagues to defeat the bill.

“(We should not be) expanding the EFA voucher program to a cost of $100 million when we lack adequate revenues to fund essential needs of New Hampshire citizens, such as Medicaid, the state employee retirement system, affordable housing, and corrections safe staffing,” Damon said. “We should fund our impressive university system that benefits our economy rather than paying stipends to wealthy families. And most importantly the public statewide has overwhelmingly and repeatedly opposed this Free State marketing scheme.”

But Ladd said the program is not a voucher program or a voucher scam and not a recruiting tool for people moving into New Hampshire, but for parents justified in wanting alternatives if their child is struggling, or being bullied or not being challenged in a “one-size-fits-all situation.”
The bill was initially approved on a 188-176 vote and was sent to the House Finance Committee for review before coming back for a final vote.

House Bill 115 has had a public hearing before the Senate Education Committee but has yet to come before the Senate for a vote.

The House also approved Senate Bill 292 which would establish a floor under state aid for special education costs that exceed three-and-a-half times the average per pupil cost the previous year. School districts have been receiving prorated state reimbursement for those costs under what was the catastrophic aid program that have been about 50 percent of their expenditures.

The bill would require that school districts receive at least 80 percent of their special education costs that reach the catastrophic level.

The bill was referred to House Finance for review before a final vote is taken on the bill.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

By the time Kelly Santos found the Education Freedom Account program, she felt out of options.

The Hudson resident had fought for years for disability accommodations for her son James at his public school, beginning in the first grade. By his fourth grade year, she had arranged letters from teachers and had paid $5,000 for a neuropsychological exam to prove to school administrators that he needed help. But without a formal evaluation, the accommodations did not appear.

“I fought to keep him with his community and his friends,” she said, speaking to members of the State Board of Education this month to advocate for the program. “Special education did not work for me because I could not get past step one, which is evaluation.”

Santos applied for local charter schools, but lost the lotteries necessary for admission. Then she found the Education Freedom Account program, and with it, an opportunity to send James to Second Nature Academy in Nashua.

It’s changed her son’s relationship to school, she says. “When I asked James, ‘What’s the difference between your old school and your new school?’ he said to me: ‘Mom I was sitting in a prison and I was bored… And when I went up to my new school that was the key that let me out of jail,’” Santos said.

“If it wasnt for the EFA, we would have been stuck without a school to go to,” she said.

The program is continuing to see similar interest. More than 4,200 New Hampshire students are participating in the Education Freedom Account program this school year – a 158 percent jump from the first year’s enrollment.

But most new participants are not following Santos’s exact path: 28 percent of the 1,577 new students this year transferred directly from public school. The others were either homeschooled or attending non-public schools before they transferred.

In total, the state will spend $22.1 million toward EFAs this school year, up from $8.1 million in the 2021-2022 school year and $14.7 million in the 2022-2023 school year, according to numbers released by the Department of Education Thursday. That money comes out of the state’s Education Trust Fund, which spends about $1 billion per year on public education. The enrollment grew by 20 percent since last year.

Launched in 2021, the Education Freedom Account program allows parents to take the state education funding dollars that would go to their child’s public school and use them for private and homeschooling expenses instead. To qualify, families must have an income below 350 percent of the federal poverty level – or $105,000 for a family of four.

Republicans, including Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, have hailed the initiative as a means for lower-income families to receive assistance to enroll their children in programs they might not otherwise be able to afford, providing alternatives if the public school is not a good fit.

But Democrats have criticized the program as wasteful and unnecessary, and argued that the Education Trust Fund dollars should be exclusive to public schools. Democrats have attempted unsuccessfully to both repeal the program and , including that students be attending public school before they can receive the vouchers. Currently, the vouchers are also available to qualifying families that don’t attend public schools.

This year, the Republican-led Legislature increased the eligibility for the program the income cap from 300 percent of the federal poverty level – where the program started – to 350 percent. Some Republicans, including gubernatorial candidates Chuck Morse and Kelly Ayotte, removing the income caps entirely in the future.

An examination of the latest numbers reveals some differences between public school students and EFA recipients. There are 4,211 students who receive EFAs and just over 160,000 students in New Hampshire public schools this year.

Of the students receiving EFAs this year, about 44 percent are enrolled in free or reduced price lunch program, meaning their families make below 185 percent of the federal poverty level, or $55,500 for a family of four. That represents a higher proportion than in public schools, where 26 percent of students are in the free or reduced lunch program.

Of all EFA recipients, 6.3 percent are receiving additional state funding for special education services. In public schools, 20 percent of students receive special education funding.

The state is spending an average of $5,255 per EFA recipient this year, according to the Department of Education. That’s a higher amount than in previous years and comes after the Legislature raised the base amount of state funding that schools receive per pupil in the two-year budget passed in June. The state is spending $6,161 per student in public schools this year, according to the department.

Among the 4,211 students receiving EFAs, 1,577 are new to the program this school year and 2,634 are returning. Since the last school year, 109 students have graduated, 75 have re-enrolled in public schools, and 524 have made “other exits,” a category not defined by the department.

In a statement Thursday, Edelblut praised the increased numbers, saying “it is apparent that New Hampshire families are taking advantage of this tremendous opportunity that provides them with different options and significant flexibility for learning.”

“With three years of data under our belt, we know that students are coming and going from the program, which is exactly how it was designed – to allow various options for personal learning needs that may fluctuate from year-to-year based on whatever path is appropriate in the moment,” Edelblut said.

Megan Tuttle, president of the National Education Association of New Hampshire, the state’s largest teacher’s union, disagreed, accusing Edelblut of “(focusing) his energy on a small sliver of the population that was never in public schools.”

“Let’s be clear – vouchers take scarce funding away from public schools and give it to private and religious schools that are unaccountable to the public,” Tuttle said in a statement Friday. “Taxpayer funds should be spent to resource neighborhood public schools to ensure they are desirable places to be and to learn, where students’ natural curiosity is inspired.”

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