For nine years, Nashmin Hosseinzadeh worked in a medical laboratory in Tehran. She trained for it, and the money it gave her allowed her to be independent.
When she and her husband moved to the Upper Valley in September 2024 for his postdoctoral position in neurology at Dartmouth, her own career stayed behind, and so did the language she was fluent in.
Hosseinzadeh, 35, had studied science, not English. The English she picked up in school in Iran was for reading and writing, she said, not for speaking. When she arrived here, she could not hold a conversation or make an appointment over the phone. She tried to find work but could not manage the search or the applications.
Her daughter was 5 and a half when they arrived, and within two months of starting school she was speaking English fluently. At times, Hosseinzadeh said, she could not understand her own daughter.
She had looked at online English course options and found them running more than $30 for a half hour. Friends told her about the free English classes at Lebanon Adult Education, which runs out of the SAU 88 Adult Learner Services office in West Lebanon. She started a year ago.
Within a few months, she could feel the difference. Then she went looking for the hardest possible proof. The blood donor program at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center wanted someone who could talk to people all day — before a collection, during and after. Two years earlier she couldn’t make a phone call in English. She applied anyway.
She told her husband she wasn’t sure. He told her she could. It was scary at first, she said. Now she spends her shifts talking to strangers.
Hosseinzadeh paid nothing for those classes. New Hampshire and the federal government did. And the people who run adult education in the state have spent the past year making a case for that money that has less to do with generosity than with arithmetic: adults who can read and speak English get better jobs, spend less time in emergency rooms and, if they have been to prison, are less likely to go back.
The Lebanon program has doubled in size in a year, absorbed the students of a neighboring center that closed, and watched its federal funding freeze for three weeks last July.
‘It’s all free’
Colby Price has directed the Lebanon program for a little over a year. He says the most common question he gets is also the one he is most eager to answer.
“People will contact me and say, ‘OK, but how much are the classes?'” Price said. “They’re free. It’s all free. Books and everything.”
The only requirements are a registration form, a placement pretest, and living or working in New Hampshire. Admission is rolling — students can join whenever they show up.
When Price took the job last year, the program had two classes and roughly 45 students. It has since grown into a full slate: English classes at different levels, some meeting in the morning and others in the evening so students can work around jobs, plus a Monday conversation group, a digital literacy course, drop-in tutoring four nights a week staffed by volunteers and HiSET high school equivalency prep.
Enrollment peaked around 115 last spring and sits at about 85 now. Most students are between 25 and 44, and there are more women than men. Most are there to learn English for everyday life; about 10 are working toward a high school credential, Price said.
The English students fall into two rough groups, he said. Some work in construction or hospitality and are juggling jobs and children. Others arrived with advanced degrees and held high positions in their home countries — law professors, professionals and the spouses of people who came to work at Dartmouth.
Hosseinzadeh is the second kind. Jenny Weng is the first.
Weng arrived from Fujian province in southeastern China in April 2024 to join a husband who had already been working in the Upper Valley for 11 years. She brought a 13-year-old son, took a job at a nail salon and started learning to drive. Doing it all at once left her exhausted and anxious, she said.
Making her anxiety worse was the lack of a shared language with the people around her. “I want to improve my English,” Weng said. So she started at SAU 88 two years ago.
She is taking both the intermediate and advanced classes now, and said she can handle most day-to-day situations, though she still asks for an interpreter at the hospital.
Asked what she finds most different about life here, she said it wasn’t the houses or the cars. “Spirit,” Weng said. People here, she said, will go do the thing that makes them happy.
At the drop-in tutoring hour, students are encouraged to bring in whatever they need. “I have a parent-teacher conference next week. I have a job interview. I need to fill out this form,” Price said, listing what walks in the door.
Two more classes are coming. The program is working with Dartmouth Hitchcock on an English course aimed at people training as licensed nursing assistants, medical assistants and phlebotomists, with a target of mid-October. Price is also adding a fourth ESL level for students who land between beginner and intermediate. He has three teachers and is hoping to hire a fourth.
21 languages
The Lebanon program absorbed the students from Claremont’s adult education center when it closed just under a year ago. The two programs had already been operating as a consortium — Claremont focused on high school equivalency, Lebanon on English — so the handoff was straightforward on paper. In practice, Price said, distance did what distance does.
“Students often say, ‘No problem, I’ll drive up from Claremont,'” he said. “And they last about two weeks.” In response, the program moved its HiSET classes fully online.
Price is reluctant to do the same with the English classes. “There are students helping students. There are people laughing,” he said. “There’s a huge social component to it, which I don’t want to ruin by taking it online.”
Hosseinzadeh felt that firsthand. Her class mixed conversation, grammar and games, she said, and she and her classmates grew close. “We found best friends,” she said.
Price, who lived in Spain for about 30 years and speaks Spanish, said when he first sat in on classes he was struck that almost no one in the room was a Spanish speaker. That has changed. Spanish is now the most common first language among students, followed by Mandarin, then Brazilian Portuguese and Haitian Creole.
According to the program’s September newsletter, 21 languages are spoken at the center, from Wolof to Pashto to Tagalog.
Classes are taught entirely in English, which Price acknowledged is hard on beginners but is the only workable approach with a mixed room.
The arithmetic
The program is funded by a federal grant under the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act, and is matched by the state. Price said New Hampshire typically puts up roughly double the federal amount, and the Lebanon School District contributes cash plus in-kind support: square footage, heat, lights, internet. The grant runs on a three-year cycle, and Lebanon just secured its next one.
The federal piece is load-bearing, and without it, the state cannot give anything, Price said.
In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Education declined to release about $715 million in adult education money that is normally distributed on July 1, as part of a broader review of more than $6 billion in education grants. The money was released later that month after pushback from school officials and members of both parties in Congress. For Price, the episode landed in the third year of an already approved grant cycle, but the program was left waiting for the money.
Asked why adult education tends to land on the chopping block early, Price said part of the stated rationale was a concern that services like free English classes would function as a draw for immigrants.
His counterargument is fiscal. “They see the bottom line is, if we ax this program, we’ll save X,” he said. “But they don’t see that in the long run (cutting adult programs) is going to cost them triple, quadruple.”
The research he points to is not hard to find. National figures compiled from the U.S. Department of Education’s 2023 adult skills survey show that 59 million American adults read at the lowest measured level. Moving up even one reading level, the data show, roughly halves a person’s likelihood of living in poverty.
The cost of not moving up tends to land on the public. A study of Medicaid enrollees found that those with very low literacy skills ran up health care charges of about $10,688 a year — nearly four times the $2,891 spent by those who read better. Researchers have traced that kind of gap largely to longer hospital stays and emergency visits that better comprehension of medical instructions might have prevented.
Price sees the health version of this play out directly. His curriculum includes a health literacy unit; last year Dartmouth medical students came in to teach it.
“When people don’t understand what’s happening, they go again and again and again until they can figure it out,” he said.
Price has watched students become more independent and more employable. His first HiSET student came in “from zero, basically,” he said. The student passed the exam, worked on interview skills with a counselor, gained confidence and landed a job.
“To just see him go all the way through, pass the test, gain confidence, become more employable, and then to land a job,” Price said. “There are so many interesting stories out there.”
The program is built to move people through and out. An English student climbs six levels, Price said; at the top, they test out and are steered toward high school equivalency, community college or an apprenticeship. That, in his telling, is the point — the classes are a way in, not a place to stay.
New Hampshire’s own numbers, reported to the federal government, show a system that is small and growing. Statewide adult education enrollment rose to 3,021 in the program year that ended in June 2025, about 100 more students than the year before.
High school equivalency completions climbed too, and just over a third of participants made a measurable gain in their skills.
The same report contains a figure relevant to the cost argument. People who took adult education classes while in state prison were less likely to end up back behind bars after their release: about a third returned, compared with more than 40% of released prisoners overall.
The state’s own analysis is careful about it, calling the result a “possible positive impact,” not a proven one.
The report also notes that waiting lists have grown in several parts of New Hampshire, with programs “limited by both funding and space availability.” Price said programs in Nashua and Manchester have ESL waiting lists of around 200 people.
He does not want one in Lebanon.
“If someone walks in this door, we’re going to hook them up with a class,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s in the middle of the course.”
Hosseinzadeh walked through that door a year ago.
Her daughter is 7 now. Every night, Hosseinzadeh reads her a book in English before bed, and they practice and grow together.
Lebanon Adult Education classes are free to anyone who lives or works in New Hampshire. The program’s office and classes are at 20 Seminary Hill in West Lebanon. Information is available at lebanonadulted.org.