As New Hampshire’s education freedom account program swells past 10,000 student participants, legislative oversight has faltered.
A committee meant to monitor the EFA program’s performance has not met publicly in more than a year, records show, and it has failed to produce its required annual report by its Nov. 30 deadline.
The Education Freedom Savings Account Oversight Committee once met multiple times per year. But according to its public page, the last time it convened was Nov. 25, 2024, shortly before finalizing its 2024 report.
In a statement Thursday, Sen. Ruth Ward, a Stoddard Republican and the chairwoman of the committee, said the five-person committee had attempted to meet this year but failed to find a time for all members to convene — particularly those from the House.
“Since the end of the legislative session, we have made several attempts to schedule a meeting,” Ward said. “However, the House asked representatives to avoid travel during July and August, limiting available dates and now with the resignation of Representative (Glenn) Cordelli, we are waiting for a House replacement.
“These factors have kept us from achieving a quorum and convening the committee,” she added, referring to the statutory requirement that the committee have three out of five members present in order to meet.
After receiving questions Thursday, Ward sent an email Friday calling on the committee to hold an organizational meeting Dec. 15, according to Rep. Peggy Balboni, a Rye Democrat and member of the committee.
But Democrats have criticized the lack of meetings and argue it highlights the need for more transparency.
The education freedom account program allows families to access state education funds to use toward private and home-school expenses; families this year will receive an average of $4,911 per year.
In June, Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed legislation that removed the income limits for the program — previously set at 350% of the federal poverty level, or $112,525 for a family of four — but set a 10,000-student cap for its first year. Due to a series of exemptions to the cap, the program began the 2025-26 school year with 10,510 students, according to the Department of Education, nearly doubling last year’s 5,765.
Republicans, who created the program in 2021 as a mechanism to support school choice, say the increase demonstrates demand. They have argued the nonprofit organization that runs the program, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, already receives sufficient oversight from the Department of Education.
But Democrats, who oppose the program and say the funding should go to public schools, counter the jump in participation calls for more scrutiny of who is receiving EFAs and how they are spent.
The oversight committee is supposed to help do that, Democrats say.
Warring reports
Created by statute, the committee consists of two members of the Senate and three members of the House, and is meant to “monitor the implementation of” the program, “including the impact of state education funding to local district schools.” It is also supposed to produce an annual report by Nov. 30 that makes any legislative recommendations.
From the beginning, the process has been fractured. Democratic and Republican committee members, disagreeing over the very existence of the program, put forward widely different concepts of acceptable practices.
In 2024, for instance, the committee produced a majority report written by Republicans and a minority report by Democrats. The Republican report gave a positive portrait. “In just four years, the Education Freedom Account program has proven itself both popular and successful,” it stated, calling it “one of the fastest start-up school choice programs in the nation.”
The majority report found that the EFA program had not reduced state funding to public schools, and pointed to legislation that has increased the per-pupil amount of state funding given to public schools despite declining enrollments. “Even as the Education Freedom Account program has grown to serve more than 5,000 New Hampshire families, per-pupil state aid to local school districts has increased by nearly 20%,” the report stated, referring to the period between 2020 and 2024.
The Republican report concluded there was no need to amend the EFA law, nor to extend the end date “phase out” grants that pay school districts gradually smaller amounts for any of their students who leave to receive an EFA.
The Democrats’ 2024 minority report produced different conclusions. It stated that much of the EFA money is going to families that had already decided not to participate in the public school system and pursue private and home-school programs. “Those families were costing the state zero dollars and now they are being given unaudited dollars,” the minority report read. The report also argued that the process by which the Children’s Scholarship Fund selects eligible vendors that may receive the EFA funds was opaque.
The 2024 minority report said there were “substantial” funds being diverted from the state’s Education Trust Fund that could be used to boost state support for public schools, which the state Supreme Court ruled this year is unconstitutionally low. And it concluded that the EFA law should be changed by putting the Department of Education in charge of running the program instead of the private scholarship fund; capping the program to a budgeted amount; widening state audits to survey 20% of accounts; decoupling the EFA grant amounts from the state adequacy formula, which regulates how much is sent to public schools; requiring EFA recipients to end any discriminatory admissions policies, and more.
Before issuing the separate reports, the oversight committee had met about once a month from August to November 2024. After that, the committee stopped meeting.
Scheduling problems
In her statement explaining the lack of meetings this year, Ward pointed to an announcement by House Speaker Sherman Packard in the House calendar in spring that “in keeping with past practice to minimize travel costs, there will be no legislative activity or mileage reimbursement between July and August.”
She also noted the resignation of Cordelli, a member of the oversight committee and a key architect of the EFA program. But Cordelli resigned in early November, meaning he could have participated in September and October.
The committee page indicates that an organizational meeting was scheduled for Oct. 21, but was canceled.
Ward said the committee had struggled to meet quorum, which according to the statute, requires three out of five members to be present. Sen. Suzanne Prentiss, a Lebanon Democrat and member of the committee, has questioned that reasoning, arguing the committee has met before when some lawmakers couldn’t attend.
“I don’t know what’s behind not meeting, but it’s not the membership thing,” she said.
Meanwhile, the status of the 2025 oversight report, which was due Nov. 30, is unclear. In her statement Thursday, Ward said “work is underway on the 2025 EFA Annual Report.”
Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, said in an interview that she had received an email from Senate Deputy Chief of Staff Grant Bosse in November asking for statistics on the demographics of who is using EFAs in the 2025-26 school year. The Department of Education released those figures Nov. 14.
That email indicated to Baker Demers that the committee was intending to produce the 2025 report despite the lack of meetings, she said.
But Democrats say if work is happening, they have not been included. Prentiss said there has been no committee-wide discussion about any work on the 2025 report.
A spokeswoman for Ward did not respond to a question about whether the EFA report was being prepared without the committee meeting.
Transparency debates
Democrats’ frustration with the oversight committee comes amid a bigger battle over transparency of the program. Democrats argue there should be more public information issued around who is signing up for EFAs and how families are spending the money.
Currently, the public can review annual reports by the Department of Education that show how many students in each town are receiving EFAs; how much those students are receiving; how many students overall have transferred into EFAs from public schools; how many EFA recipients have been approved for additional aid because they are lower-income, are English language learners, or require special education services; the racial and gender breakdown of EFA recipients; the number of EFA recipients in each grade level; and how all those metrics compare to the public school student population.
The Children’s Scholarship Fund submits an annual 990 form to the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit organization, which details top-level receipts and expenditures. The organization also commissions an annual audit of its receipts and expenditures by Grant Thornton, a New York-based accounting firm, and publishes the results; the latest 2025 audit will be published Monday, Baker Demers said.
The EFA program receives a semi-regular audit from the state Department of Education. In 2023, the department’s EFA administrator conducted a “compliance monitoring review” of 50 randomized EFA accounts, using tax return information to determine whether they had actually been eligible for the program. That review, released in 2024, flagged problems with 12 of the 50 recipients, and resulted in the Children’s Scholarship Fund returning EFA funding for two students and addressing other recommendations.
Baker Demers said that in recent months, the department has begun a second compliance monitoring review of EFAs using the same randomized process; a spokeswoman for the department declined to confirm that.
Meanwhile, the Legislative Budget Assistant, or LBA, a nonpartisan arm of the legislative branch that conducts audits on state agencies, is reviewing the Department of Education’s oversight of the EFA law; that final audit report is expected by summer 2026, LBA staff say.
Baker Demers says the combination of those reviews indicates that the EFA program is already subject to a lot of scrutiny.
“I don’t mind it,” she said. “It’s good – great to do audits. But it’s like a perpetual audit.”
But Democrats say there are still many areas where they would like more information.
They note that LBA auditors were blocked by statute from reviewing the Children’s Scholarship Fund actions directly, meaning the LBA audit will focus only on the Department of Education’s oversight of the program, and not on the approval process of EFA applicants and vendors conducted by the scholarship fund.
And they have also pointed to a decision by Baker Demers this summer to remove reports detailing how much EFA money was sent to each vendor, a move first reported by the Concord Monitor. Baker Demers told the Monitor she had done so due to the potential for harassment of smaller vendors by people opposed to the EFA program.
On Thursday, she said the Children’s Scholarship Fund would re-upload the expenditure reports for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years — as well as the unreleased reports for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years — by the end of December. Those reports would redact spending data for EFA vendors serving fewer than 10 students, Baker Demers said, citing privacy and harassment concerns.
To Balboni, those measures still fall short of the accountability she feels the EFA program deserves. Next year, she is introducing two bills intended to address that. One would require the legislative oversight committee to conduct a “review of student data, eligibility requirements, and EFA expenditures.” The other would require the Department of Education to obtain full access to EFA recipient data and to conduct more extensive audits.
“It’s just trying to get to the heart of where this money is going,” Balboni said in an interview.
To Ward, there is already plenty of information to review. “The process continues to be transparent: reports from the Children’s Scholarship Fund, EFA meeting minutes, and annual reports are publicly accessible,” she said in her statement.
New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com.
