New Hampshire School Voucher Program Subject Of Lawsuit

At Forbes, I have news of a lawsuit that challenges the legality of New Hampshire’s school voucher program.

New Hampshire has one of the more generous school voucher programs in the nation. Now a suit has been filed charging that it violates education funding statutes as well as the New Hampshire constitution.

Education Savings Accounts, a kind of super-voucher, have been pushed in New Hampshire for several years, championed by Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, a businessman/legislator who homeschooled his children and has long championed school choice. Edelblut bowed out of a gubernatorial race with Chris Sununu, and was subsequently appointed to the head education spot by Sununu, where he butted heads with the Democratic-led legislature.

In 2020, the GOP flipped both the House and Senate. One of their first orders of business was a new voucher bill. They used the name “education freedom accounts,” an echo of Betsy DeVos’s ill-fated national voucher plan. The state would hand its share of a student’s education funding to a scholarship organization to give to families for a wide assortment of expenses, with loose limits on who could get the voucher, few limits on how it could be spent, and no oversight of the taxpayer dollars.

The vouchers are funded by the state’s Education Trust Fund. That fund was established in 1999 as a result of Claremont School District v. Governor of New Hampshire, a case that resulted in an agreement that the state would kick in a larger share of school funding.

The Education Trust Fund was where that state funding would be held, and the current rules are pretty clear on how the funds may be used. The funds

shall not be used for any purpose other than to distribute adequate education grants to municipalities' school districts and to approved charter schools...

In short, the law does not indicate that the funds may be used for vouchers, education savings accounts, or Education Freedom Accounts.

And that’s not the only problem. Read the full piece here.