After year of not meeting, Republican-led NH EFA oversight committee produces report

A draft version of a Republican oversight report on education freedom accounts concludes the program is “popular and successful” and pushes back at Democratic arguments that it detracts from public schools. 

“There is no evidence that increased participation in the EFA program has reduced state support for local school districts across New Hampshire,” the report states, addressing the program that allows New Hampshire families to use state funds to pay for private and home schooling expenses. 

“Earlier this year, EdChoice determined that ‘New Hampshire’s success in implementing the expansive Education Freedom Account program is a model for states across the nation,’” the report states elsewhere.

The draft report, written by Sen. Ruth Ward, R-Stoddard, dismisses some of Democrats’ attempts to pare back the program.

“After five years of growth and success, it is obvious that opponents of school choice will never accept the value of giving New Hampshire parents discretion to use state education funds in the manner they believe would best benefit their children,” the report reads. 

But the report does call for the Department of Education to propose a process to aggregate EFA student assessment data in order to better measure the program’s academic outcomes. 

And it says the Legislature should clarify whether the state is allowed to contract with “more than one organization to administer EFA funds.” Currently one nonprofit organization, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, administers all EFA accounts using the state adequacy funds. 

Return to meeting

The process to create the Republican report — and the reaction to it by Democrats — showcased deep partisan divisions over the voucher-like program. 

Ward released the report during a meeting of the Education Freedom Savings Account Oversight Committee Tuesday morning, its first in more than a year. The committee, which met regularly in 2024 to discuss EFA program data and hear from officials, stopped meeting in November of that year. 

Democrats have criticized the lack of meetings, arguing it undermined oversight of the EFA program at a time when the program nearly doubled its enrollment this year after lawmakers removed income eligibility limits. Ward has said she tried scheduling meetings in 2025 but struggled to get enough members of the House to attend to achieve a quorum. 

Due to the absence of meetings, Ward’s draft majority report was assembled without Democratic input. And Democrats produced a minority report Tuesday that was written without Republican input. 

According to official numbers released by the Department of Education in November, the EFA program had 10,510 students at the start of the 2025-26 school year, up from 5,321 last year. That increase comes after the Legislature passed a law this year lifting the previous income limits and imposing a 10,000-student cap, with some exceptions. 

Clashing reports

In their minority EFA oversight report, Democrats on the committee castigated the lack of meetings. “No oversight has been conducted in any capacity,” they wrote. 

Democrats criticized the Children’s Scholarship Fund for removing records from its website that detailed the amount of money each vendor received in EFA funds. Kate Baker Demers, executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, says that was done to prevent harassment of the vendors by critics of the programs; she has since vowed to return the records by the end of December with some redactions for small programs. 

“The legislature should be taking steps for greater accountability for this program which serves less than 5% of New Hampshire’s students,” Democrats wrote. 

The Democrats also argued the EFA program has strayed from its original stated goal to help students struggling in public schools to have the means to leave those schools. This school year, 3.3% of EFA recipients were in public schools the year before, Democrats noted.

“The number of EFA/voucher recipients continues to grow yet the number of students switching out of public schools to alternative programs does not. 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.”

But the Republican report did highlight a rare potential area for common ground: assessment data. Currently, EFA recipients are required to provide the Children’s Scholarship Fund with either report cards; a review of the student’s academic portfolio by a working New Hampshire teacher; results from the New Hampshire statewide assessment; or the results from another standardized test such as the SAT. But that information is shared only with the student’s parents and is not available to the public. 

Speaking to the committee Tuesday, Senate Deputy Chief of Staff Grant Bosse, who helped write the report, said any release of an aggregation of assessment data would have to overcome privacy concerns. That might mean excluding schools with small numbers of EFA recipients whose EFA students might be identifiable. 

“Sen. Ward has had conversations with (Department of Education) Commissioner (Caitlin) Davis and we think it could be possible to aggregate the data (in a way) that does not impede on privacy of individual students, and we think that would be very helpful to know as a group how these students are doing,” Bosse said. 

The reports are not final; Ward said the committee would meet again in the coming weeks to make final alterations.