Students who have Educational Freedom Accounts, commonly known as vouchers, are not entitled to free participation in programming from their local districts
By Kelly Burch, Granite State News Collaborative
School districts around the state are scrambling to draft policies about whether and how to charge tuition to students enrolled in the Education Freedom Account program — students who, unlike traditional homeschoolers, are not legally entitled to free participation in district programming.
“It’s emerging from almost the premise of double-dipping," said Nicole Heimarck, executive director of Reaching Higher NH, a nonprofit focused on education.
The EFA program, commonly known as vouchers, allows families to directly access the state portion of educational funding, known as adequacy funding. This year, the base amount is $4,182, with additional funds for some students, including those with disabilities or who qualify for free and reduced lunches. Last year, families received an average EFA grant of $5,204, according to the state Department of Education.
It’s relatively common for students educated outside of public schools to participate in select activities in their local school, like science lab, sports or band, educators say. Yet EFA students are not entitled to participate free of charge in programming from their local districts, as districts are no longer receiving state funds to educate those pupils. According to the N.H. Department of Education, districts may allow EFA students to participate in classes and extracurriculars free of charge, decline to allow participation, or charge tuition.
"That’s totally up to the community itself,” said William Phillips, staff attorney and director of policy services with the N.H. School Boards Association.
The need to draft policies has become more acute this year, Phillips said, due to the expansion of the EFA program. In August, the program met its 10,000-student cap, nearly double the 5,321 students enrolled last year, before the state removed income caps for the programs. State law allows for the continued expansion of the program if it meets its cap annually.
Responsibility to taxpayers, students
The Kearsarge Regional School District — which made headlines last year after a resident introduced the idea of a per-pupil spending cap — is one of the school administrative units looking into charging students who are receiving EFAs and also participating in district programming.
Michael Bessette, assistant superintendent in the district, said charging tuition is a matter of being responsible to the local taxpayers who fund the schools.
“We work hard to try to get the best out of taxpayer dollars,” Bessette said. “They’re expensive dollars.”
If a family is taking EFA funds, but also free district services, “they’re double-dipping,” Bassette said.
(By comparison, if a traditional homeschool student takes classes or extracurriculars at the district, the state pays a portion of that student’s adequacy funding to the district, so the district is compensated, educators note.)
In New London — one of the seven towns in the Kearsarge district — there were 35 EFA students as of early September. If those children were enrolled in public schools, the district would receive an extra $158,452.92 in adequacy funding from the state, Bassette said.
Proponents of EFAs point out that families receiving the vouchers are still supporting public schools through their property taxes. Local funding accounts for about 70% of public school funding in New Hampshire, according to the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute.
“If you’re living in a town and paying property tax, that money is funding the school,” said Kate Baker Demers, executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which administers the EFA program.
Because of that, “a district, especially a smaller district with a relatively close-knit community, might be more accepting of students from within the district at no charge,” said Phillips.
Districts may be more apt to charge tuition to EFA students who aren’t local residents, he added.
“When you bring in a student from another district it’s reasonable for all of the taxpayers, the folks who are funding the local school, to have some offset,” he said.
The N.H. School Boards Association sometimes provides sample policies for districts to adapt. The association hasn’t done that for EFAs and tuition due to the “enormous variance in how a district might do this,” Phillips said.
‘As transparent as mud’
When EFAs were established in 2021, Anne Fowler knew she was “going to have a difficult time.”
Fowler is principal of the Concord Regional Technical Center, one of the state’s Career and Technical Education centers. When a student enrolls in a technical school, the center bills the student’s home district for tuition, which varies by program but is typically $7,000 to $8,000 annually, according to Fowler.
If a student receives an EFA, the residential school district isn’t responsible for tuition; the family is. The tuition bill came as a surprise to at least one family enrolled at the Concord technical center last year, Fowler said.
To try to avoid surprise billing, she amended the school's application to ask prospective students if they have an EFA. Yet she remains concerned that when this year’s tuition bills are mailed in February, she may notice students who misclassified themselves as homeschoolers when they are, in fact, receiving an EFA.
Fowler’s experience highlights a common frustration for districts: It’s very difficult to identify which students receive EFA funding.
“It’s entirely self-reported,” Phillips said. “The districts have no way of monitoring it.”
This fall, the department of education made it easier for districts to identify a “cross-district conflict” — a student who receives an EFA and is also enrolled more than 50% of the time in a local district, educators say. That’s not allowed under state law.
At Kearsarge Regional High School, five students are in violation of that law, according to Bassette. The district is working with those families and will likely give them a deadline by which they must be under the 50% enrollment threshold or withdraw from the EFA program, he said.
Yet there’s still no simple way for districts to identify students who are receiving an EFA — and thus could be charged tuition, but who are not enrolled in the district more than 50% of the time. Kearsarge is trying to identify these students using multiple data sheets and student identification numbers, but the process is arduous, Bassette said.
“It’s been really challenging to obtain information on education freedom accounts,” said Heimarck. “We have heard stories of districts having a hard time verifying whether a student is public school enrolled or a voucher student, and that is creating funding problems for our local districts.”
That’s a point of great frustration for educators.
"This transparency that the state talks about is about as transparent as mud,” Bassette said.
In addition, there’s nothing stopping families from quickly spending down their EFA funding on eligible expenses, then reclassifying themselves as homeschool students to access district programming without charge, Phillips said. It’s “very problematic,” he added.
A strain across the system
Baker Demers said that she’s glad to see more people talking about using EFAs to pay for programming at public schools. Some districts, she said, have been accepting EFA funds for years.
“It’s exciting that that’s on everyone’s radar now, because the public schools can be an incredible resource,” she said. “That is the entire goal of participating in the EFA, to find each educational or learning opportunity that matches the child’s needs exactly.”
However, some educators feel that the state is reinforcing existing inequities by funding EFAs while underfunding other educational options.
Bassette said Kearsarge can only update its policies because they have the money and staff to research exactly how many students are receiving EFAs and participating in district programming. That likely wouldn’t happen in under-funded districts like Newport or Claremont, he added.
"Because we have somebody who monitors this type of data, we were able to discover it,” he said.
Fowler pointed out that there’s often a gap in payments for technical education due to the state underpaying its portion of the bill. The gap falls to local districts to pay, she said. It occurs because the state has capped funding for career and technical centers at $9 million, while allocating $27.7 million, last year, for EFAs.
“It doesn’t seem equitable …” Fowler said. “Schools are being pinched. Taxpayers are upset. And the students themselves are losing out at the end of the day.”
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