This story is part of an ongoing series by the Concord Monitor about New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program. Read the other stories here. NHPR is republishing this story in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Just after lunch on a recent Wednesday, a cacophony of noise emanated from Laconia Christian Academy teacher Rebecca Mitchell’s second-floor classroom. Some twenty-odd students, packed tightly at gray desks in groups of twos, threes, and fours, playfully ribbed Mitchell about the levies for pens and pencils she had imposed to illustrate how King George III taxed the colonists.
As the controlled chaos played out around him, fourth-grader Matty Wiebe sat quietly in the middle of the room, breaking into a braces-filled smile.
“In terms of talking, it’s always loud somewhere,” said Wiebe, a nine-year-old with wavy brown hair who loves to ski and hike.
Wiebe and his fellow fourth graders are just weeks away from the end of a year that has proved noisier – and more crowded – than any before it. For the first time, they are sharing a classroom with the grade above them.
The change wasn’t driven by a new educational philosophy. The Lakes Region school has simply run out of room.
Laconia Christian’s kindergarten through 12th grade enrollment has grown a staggering 44% over the last four years – from 95 students in 2021 to 137 this school year. In addition to leading the school to combine grade levels, this increase has forced administrators, including Head of School Rick Duba, into makeshift offices in former storage rooms.
Duba anticipates the growth will continue, potentially propelling the school’s enrollment to 195 students in the coming years. To make room, the school launched a $500,000 capital campaign this year to fund a 4,800-square-foot expansion that will add three classrooms, new meeting space and bathrooms.By most measures, Laconia Christian’s recent expansion would be striking. In the world of Christian education in New Hampshire, it is relatively modest.
In the four years since New Hampshire launched a school voucher program, 11 of the 28 Christian schools in the state have either newly opened or grown by at least 50%, a Concord Monitor analysis of state enrollment data found. Overall, statewide enrollment in independent Christian schools – which now educate almost one-fifth of private school students – has increased 30% during that period, from 2,242 to 2,911 students. In Concord, Concord Christian and Trinity Christian have grown by 23% and 12%, respectively, a collective increase of 88 students.
Enrollment in all other private schools increased 5% during the same four-year stretch. (The state department of education classifies independent Christian schools separately from parochial schools. Though parochial schools also receive a significant amount of voucher dollars, their total enrollment increased by just 5%. This analysis also includes special education schools, which are typically financed by public school districts.)
While growing distrust of public schools over pandemic masking and gender identity have played a role, the voucher program – called Education Freedom Accounts – has driven a significant portion of the enrollment spike, particularly in low-income regions, interviews with more than a dozen school leaders, parents and experts revealed.
“We just happen to be in an environment, and in an economic part of the state, where the demographic is such that EFAs have a huge impact on our growth,” said Duba, whose school received more money than any other in 2022-23, the most recent year for which spending data is available. Duba said 53% of his students receive money through the government-funded program, which provided students statewide an average of $5,204 per student this year.
The influx of cash has also led some schools to reallocate institutional support away from individual families and instead to other school needs. Claremont Christian, for example, lowered its total financial aid from about $70,000 per year to $12,000, according to interim Head of School Karl Baker.
“The EFA has made a huge financial impact on the school because now we actually have paying students versus students who were on a scholarship that we weren’t getting any money for,” Baker said.
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A Monitor survey of the 25 schools that received at least $100,000 in EFA funds in 2022-23 found that up to 27% of the schools’ total annual revenue comes from the government program.
The outsized impact of EFAs on Christian schools should come as no surprise. In the 2022–23 school year, nearly 90% of all voucher dollars spent on tuition went to religiously affiliated schools, the Monitor previously reported. A quarter of that funding was concentrated at just four institutions: Laconia Christian, Concord Christian, Portsmouth Christian and Mount Royal.
But the financial, organizational and historical factors that have led a relatively small group of Christian schools and their students to disproportionately benefit from the program have remained somewhat of a mystery.
The Monitor’s investigation uncovered two main reasons behind the disparity.
First, the schools are able to keep their prices low enough – typically between $6,000 and $14,000 per year – for the voucher money to make a significant difference in total cost. Second, Christian institutions have led a decades-long national effort to establish voucher programs. Once they arrived in New Hampshire, schools and churches were prepared, deploying a well-organized outreach campaign to get families enrolled.
As state lawmakers appear poised to dramatically expand eligibility for the program in the coming months, school leaders are preparing for their growth to continue.
In addition to Laconia Christian, Claremont Christian is currently exploring a substantial expansion, and Concord Christian added two classrooms this year, according to leaders at both schools.
“Our goal is to continue to grow our school with manageable enrollment growth,” Concord Christian Head of School Rob Starner said.
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Teachers ‘subsidizing cost’
Duba, an NPR-listening former public school teacher, has led Laconia Christian Academy since 2004. Three of his children graduated from the school, which sits on 140 acres near Laconia’s border with Meredith. While the woods that surround the four-building campus may rival the natural surroundings of nearby prep schools like Holderness or St. Paul’s, the price tag certainly doesn’t.
At up to $13,200 for high school, the annual tuition at Laconia Christian is even less than the average cost-per-pupil of nearby Laconia High School, which is $21,000. (The statewide public school average cost-per-pupil was $21,545 last year.)
Laconia Christian’s tuition is on the higher end compared to some of its peers, according to school officials’ responses to the Monitor survey. Starting tuition at some elementary schools falls as low as $6,700, and certain institutions offer discounts for additional children in a family, which can bring the cost down to under $6,000.
The cost differential compared to non-sectarian private schools is the single biggest reason why Christian schools receive the bulk of EFA dollars.
“When you’re talking about tuition ranging between $12,000 and $13,000, $4,000 is a huge amount of money to a family,” Duba said. “Whereas if you’re looking at regular independent schools – at $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year – it’s a drop in the bucket.”
The only non-religious school among the top 25 recipients of EFA dollars was High Mowing, a Waldorf school in Wilton. At $17,859, its elementary and middle school tuition was still higher than that of any Christian school that responded to the survey, but closer than its non-religious peer institutions. High Mowing’s enrollment has increased 27%.
Christian schools are able to keep their costs so low for three major reasons: Teachers accept lower pay because they view their work as aligned with their faith; some schools receive financial support from associated churches; and the institutions generally don’t accept students who have special education needs more complex than that of a learning disability, limiting a major cost that public schools bear.
At Laconia Christian, the average teacher earns $41,900 per year, the highest-paid teacher earns $48,995, and the school does not offer employees a standard insurance package, Duba said. (The school does offer a $4,000 health reserve account.)
“My teachers make less here than the average family that sends their kids here do,” Duba said. “So in reality, our teachers are subsidizing the cost of attending private school.”
On top of the lower personnel costs, many Christian schools receive a portion of their funding from the churches with which they are affiliated. Trinity Baptist Church on Concord’s Clinton Street underwrites “over $115,000” per year of expenses for its school, Trinity Christian, according to Mike Kingsley, the church’s director for educational ministries. The school, which has some of the lowest tuition rates in the state, received the fifth-most EFA dollars in 2022-23 and has experienced a 12% enrollment increase since the program started.
“We’ve been able to keep that tuition lower because the church says this is a priority: We want to make Christian education, a biblical worldview, solid academic training available to as many families as possible,” Kingsley said.
The single most unpredictable expenditure for public schools is for special education services, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for students who attend out-of-district special education schools. Though public schools must provide these services, private schools – both religious and nonreligious – can legally choose to avoid them.
Most Christian school leaders said they offer basic special education services for students who have disabilities like ADHD. Parents who had students with learning challenges said in interviews with the Monitor that they were satisfied with the schools’ small class sizes and the extra attention their children receive.
But most schools do not admit students with needs that are more complex and don’t employ full-time one-on-one aides. Some schools, including Concord Christian, charge families an extra fee to access even the less-involved support.
“We do special ed here, but it is very different than public school because they can have a high-end special ed need and we can’t,” said Alice Pinard, the dean of academics at Concord Christian.
The school employs three special educators for its 324-student body, a ratio of 108-1. By contrast, the public Concord School District employs 211 special educators in its 3,904-student district, according to district human resources director Michele Garon, a ratio of 19-1.
Duba sent one of his sons, who was born with a genetic disorder, to a public school due to Laconia Christian’s service limitations.
“We would have loved to have him here, but it would have been just to be in this space and with his brothers and his sister,” Duba said. “It wouldn’t be to get an education because we couldn’t have met his needs.”
Churches ‘as an on-ramp’
After moving from Utah to Deering, New Hampshire, in 2020, Kaytlynn Kopp and her husband initially homeschooled their school-aged children. However, the couple ultimately decided that approach wasn’t a great fit for their family. When it came time to consider schools, the most obvious option was at their church, Trinity Baptist.
“It was a no-brainer for us,” said Kopp, whose four boys now all attend Trinity Christian and receive EFA funds.
The role of the church in both recruiting families like Kopp’s to associated schools and shepherding them through the voucher application process is an important aspect of why Christian schools have so successfully capitalized on the state’s voucher program, according to Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor who studies similar programs across the country.
“Churches serve as an on-ramp to a very complicated red-tape process,” Cowen said.
The relationship between school choice advocacy and Christian institutions – a history that Cowen describes in his book, “The Privateers” – goes back over six decades to 1959, when a group of Catholics from St. Louis grew involved in a nascent movement, forming the group Citizens for Educational Freedom. Their mission, they said at the time, was to ensure a “God-given and inalienable right [for] parents to direct and control their children’s education.”
The first voucher programs in the country that bear some resemblance to New Hampshire’s launched in the 1990s in the Midwest and have since spread to more than a dozen states. Legislation is currently proceeding through Congress to establish a federal voucher program.
Leaders of the voucher movement, such as former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, have been explicit at times about the religious motivation behind their advocacy.
In 2001, years prior to becoming the education secretary, DeVos described vouchers and other school choice programs as a way to “advance God’s kingdom.”
Cowen said that DeVos “sees public schools as having displaced churches as centers of community, and she wants vouchers to help replace churches again as centers of community.”
Lobbying for the programs is only half the battle, though. Once they get created, school and church leaders work hard to get families on board, relying on frequent reminders and financial aid processes tailored to the program, many school administrators and parents said.
“This is a gift to them. It’s money which is a benefit for them, and they are able to obtain it,” said Pinard, the Concord Christian administrator. “So it’s not so much we want to pressure them as much as we want to encourage them to actualize the benefit of the EFA.”
By the time the EFA program launched in 2021, many of the schools that would ultimately receive the most money already had a head start of sorts.
In 2013, the state established a precursor to the voucher program called the education tax credit, which allows businesses to receive tax discounts for donations to approved scholarship organizations. Like the vouchers, anyone could have conceivably taken advantage of the program, but most families that secured the scholarships attended the same religious institutions that would top the EFA funding list years later.
In fact, of the two entities that obtained state approval to operate as scholarship organizations, one of them – called the Giving and Going Alliance – catered exclusively to just four schools: Laconia Christian, Concord Christian, Portsmouth Christian, and Claremont Christian, the first, second, third, and eighth-largest recipients of EFA dollars, respectively, according to annual reports.
Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the company the state contracts to administer the EFA program, believes the Giving and Going Alliance gave those schools and the families who attended them “a higher level of awareness” when the EFA program launched.
“I think because they were running their own scholarship organization, they were more clued in,” said Baker Demers, whose company also serves as the other scholarship organization that administers the ETCs.
Since the EFA program began, the Giving and Going Alliance has stopped operating as an approved ETC scholarship organization, but families who attend Christian schools continue to receive ETC scholarships through Baker Demers’ company, which is called the Children’s Scholarship Fund.
‘Perfect storm’
Most school leaders said that the voucher program was not the only reason – and in some cases, not even the biggest – why their enrollment had increased.
New Hampshire introduced EFAs in the fall of 2021, amid growing frustration about public schools’ pandemic-related restrictions and a festering distrust about how they addressed gender identity.
While much of the pandemic-era spike occurred the year prior, school leaders said that they were still attracting students during the 2021-22 school year on the basis of their limited or non-existent masking requirements and the fact that they stayed open.
“EFAs really took off right about the same time COVID came through the state,” Duba said. “So in terms of growth, I think people were looking for schools that stayed largely intact through COVID and most of the Christian schools did.”
The schools also served as a safe haven for parents who had grown disillusioned with how public schools were approaching culture war issues.
“I think that religious schools are probably seen as a wall – as a bastion – against some of these current issues that tend to be very divisive,” said Kingsley, the leader of Trinity Christian. “And so the families that are saying, ‘We want our students in a conservative place where they’re going to be taught traditional values,’ see a religious school as being that.”
Though the schools vary to some extent, they generally bar students, families and staff from identifying with pronouns other than those associated with their birth sex or engaging in same-sex relationships.
Some schools require community members to sign a statement of faith that explicitly defines their beliefs on issues such as gender and abortion.
Claremont Christian’s statement, which specifies that “God created mankind male and female that they might be joined in marriage,” includes asterisks clarifying that the individuals must be a “biological” man and a woman “by birth.”
Concord Christian’s handbook states that the school may refuse admission to students who have family members “professing to be a homosexual/bisexual/transgender person” or “supporting or otherwise promoting such practices.”
“They just probably wouldn’t feel comfortable” at Concord Christian, said Starner, the head of school.
On top of Christian schools’ approaches to the pandemic and to gender, there were school-specific reasons why their enrollment grew, too.
Matty Wiebe’s family moved from Ontario to New Hampshire because his mother, Kensie Wiebe, was hired to lead an innovative new outdoor education program called TimberNook. The program, which allows Laconia Christian elementary school students to spend an additional five hours outside per week, has itself served as a major draw for some new students.
Duba said it’s difficult to determine exactly how much each factor has contributed to the school’s growth over the past four years.
“Especially in our elementary school, we take a pretty traditional approach to gender. We have a great outdoor program with great outdoor staff. We’re a little bit more affordable than we used to be because of EFAs,” Duba said.
“It’s kind of like a perfect storm,” he added.
These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.
