Concern about the potential harassment of education providers led the organization that administers the state’s education freedom account program to remove from its website documents that show how money from the government-funded program is being spent.
The removed documents include line-by-line lists of where millions of dollars in funds went during the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. They were taken down this summer, Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, said in an interview this week.
“We learned that some individuals may have been misusing these reports to contact or harass small providers, or to question them about students and their activities,” Baker Demers said. “If true, this behavior is deeply concerning and could even be viewed as a form of stalking.”
The decision was prompted primarily by testimony last April at a hearing on a bill to remove the income cap for the EFA program, according to Baker Demers. Patty Long, a Peterborough resident who opposed the bill, testified that she had contacted a company listed in the documents to inquire about the services it provided.
“I have done research. I have called these places,” Long said at the hearing. “I have called a piano place where a student actually bought a piano. They do not have piano lessons.”
She also testified that she had run into a family while hiking and asked them why they weren’t in school. She said they told her, “We can do whatever we want and — guess what? — the state gives us money so that we can buy skis.”
Long vehemently rejected Baker Demers’ characterization of her behavior as concerning, which she said was untrue and “very offensive”.
“When she said I’m harassing people, I’m not harassing anyone,” Long said in an interview last week. “I just inquired like I was a person off the road and I called and I said, ‘Do you have piano lessons?’”
The company Long contacted was Falcetti Pianos, a piano store with locations in four cities, including Nashua. Long said she was curious about the company because the now-removed documents showed families had spent an average of $750 per purchase at the store. The program’s rules state that families may use their funding to purchase musical instruments when they are “required by a curriculum or education program.”
Long, a former public school teacher who frequently speaks out against the education freedom account program, said Falcetti Pianos was the only business she contacted.
“I have every right to call those places,” she said.
Long said she believed the documents had been removed not because of a legitimate concern about harassment but rather because Baker Demers “knows people are inquiring and questioning how the education freedom accounts are being spent.”
The education freedom account program, which allots an average of almost $5,000 per child to families who choose to participate, has weathered significant outcry from Democrats and public school advocates since it started in 2021. Proponents argue the program gives families who wish to enroll their children in private school or homeschool the power to direct education funding accordingly, while opponents say the reallocation of funding is a threat to public education and comes with minimal guardrails.
This year, after the legislature approved the bill that Long opposed, participation nearly doubled — from 5,765 to 10,510 students. The state is set to spend $51.6 million on the program this year, roughly 30% more than the $39.3 million that had been budgeted for it.
Long said her advocacy is fueled by concern that the expanded program will bankrupt the state and hurt its public education system.
“I don’t want to sound like a lunatic, like I’m sitting in my kitchen calling about pianos,” she said. “There’s a reason why I’ve done this.”
“My two daughters both learned instruments in the public schools and both those instruments I had to pay for out of my own money,” she added. “In the public schools, if you want to play an instrument, you have pay for it.”
The Children’s Scholarship Fund, which has administered the program since its inception, is not required by the terms of its contract with the state to publish how the money is being spent. Baker Demers said she originally elected to do so “as an extra step to promote transparency,” which she noted the organization was recognized for doing.
She said that Long’s testimony, coupled with the “polarized environment that we’re in,” made her rethink whether keeping the records online was prudent.
“I found the legislative testimony worrying, enough to be concerned about student safety,” she said.
Baker Demers said she is working to republish the previously-removed documents by the end of this calendar year, along with documents for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, which have never been released.
However, she said the Children’s Scholarship Fund planned to redact or alter them in some way to protect student and education provider privacy. She said they are considering redacting the name of any provider at which fewer than 10 students spent money or grouping the expenditures by category and entirely removing any reference to how much money specific providers received.
The latter option would mean that the public would have no way of knowing which organizations are receiving the most money from the program, which is funded through the state’s education trust fund.
A five-part Concord Monitor series relied heavily on the documents to uncover that nearly 90% of the money spent on tuition goes to religiously-affiliated schools, which has spurred a corresponding enrollment boom. The analysis also found that families spent more than half a million dollars during the 2022-23 school year on activities that are typically considered extracurricular, including $46,000 at area ski mountains, $35,000 at martial arts schools, and $16,000 at equestrian facilities.
Information from the removed documents remains publicly available online, including in a pair of Monitor-created databases.
Regardless of whether it chooses to redact the names of providers on the financial documents, the Children’s Scholarship Fund is required by the terms of its contract to maintain a separate list of approved providers, which it has continued to do.
Baker Demers said her non-profit has been slowed in getting the updated reports back online because it has struggled to hire a reconciliation and reporting manager. While short-staffed, she said they are prioritizing the seven reports per year required by the state.
In response to questions about the removal of the financial documents, Kim Houghton, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, wrote that the department “is not responsible for the content of the Children’s Scholarship Fund website.”
Sen. Debra Altschiller, D-Stratham, a member of the Senate Education Committee, said in an interview that she was skeptical of the claimed safety concerns raised by Baker Demers.
“I’m curious as to why Ms. Baker Demers would take public testimony and extrapolate a potential crime out of that and to further inflame conversations by saying it looks like stalking to her,” Altschiller said. “That’s really dangerous language to use when she doesn’t have any more information. If she has more information, she should share it with law enforcement, and with the policy committees, and with the Department of Education.”
Baker Demers said she had not contacted police about Long’s testimony.
She argued that the documents in their original form could be used to identify how specific families spent their money.
“If you live in a small town, and you can see your two towns’ providers there, and you know there’s three kids in the EFA in your town — I think that’s how the person in the YouTube video did it,” Baker Demers said, referring to Long’s testimony.
Long lives roughly an hour away from Falcetti Pianos’ nearest store and said she was not attempting to identify individual students.
“She’s got a very active imagination,” Altschiller said in response to Baker Demers’ concern that financial documents could lead individuals to extrapolate how specific families were spending their money. “To the best of my knowledge, none of this has happened and it’s a very convoluted hypothetical.”
Altschiller has submitted a legislative service request for a bill to be drafted that would require that the state hold a competitive bid process every three years for the contract that the Children’s Scholarship Fund has held since the education freedom account program started.