by Anya Kamenetz, The Hechinger Report
January 22, 2026
LACONIA, N.H. — Three dozen 4- and 5-year-olds trooped out onto the stage of the ornate, century-old Colonial Theatre of Laconia on this central New Hampshire city. Wearing plaid, purple, inexperienced and sparkles, some have been grinning and waving, some seemed a bit shell-shocked; a tiny blonde lady sobbed with stage fright in her trainer’s arms.
No sooner did the kids open their mouths to sing, “Merry Christmas! … That is the day that the Lord was born!” than the home lights got here up and a fireplace alarm went off.
It was an unusually eventful annual Christmas live performance for Laconia Christian Academy. Then once more, it’s been an unusually eventful yr. In a small, growing older state, the place total faculty enrollment has been dropping for greater than 20 years, Laconia reported a 130 % improve in enrollment in its elementary faculty since 2020 — and started a three-quarter-million-dollar campus growth on its 140 acres outdoors city.
“We’re in a season of unimaginable progress,” the varsity’s web site reads.
One purpose for the season: Nearly each pupil on the academy is enrolled in New Hampshire’s Training Freedom Account program, stated Head of College Rick Duba. No matter their household earnings, they obtain 1000’s of {dollars} every in taxpayer cash to assist pay their tuition.
In June, New Hampshire turned the 18th state to move a common personal faculty alternative program. After signing the invoice into legislation, Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte introduced, “Giving dad and mom the liberty to decide on the training setting that most closely fits their youngster’s wants will assist each pupil in our state attain their full potential.”
But, as these packages proliferate, with vital growth for the reason that pandemic, Democrats, lecturers unions and different public faculty advocates are elevating the alarm about accountability, transparency and funding. And with President Donald Trump passing a federal voucher program to start out in 2027, some are involved about the way forward for public training as an entire.
“I feel these packages are the most important change in Okay-12 training since Brown v. Board of Ed,” stated Douglas Harris, a scholar at Tulane who just lately revealed two papers on the influence of common personal faculty alternative packages. He argues that vouchers have been initially launched within the Nineteen Fifties partly to withstand desegregation by funding white households to attend personal faculties.
Based on his October 2025 paper, personal faculty alternative “permits faculties to discriminate in opposition to sure college students, entwines authorities with faith, includes a big fiscal price, and has proven pretty poor, or at greatest inconclusive, tutorial outcomes.” Harris stated in an interview, “It adjustments basically all the essential traditions of the training system.”
New Hampshire could possibly be a harbinger of that basic change. Specialists say the state has one of many broadest and least regulated common faculty alternative packages within the nation. “Common” refers to the truth that households, no matter earnings, are eligible for a mean $5,200 a yr from the federal government to pay tuition at a personal faculty or complement the price of homeschooling. The variety of recipients reached 10,510 this yr, and it’s more likely to develop once more subsequent yr.
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“Common” additionally describes the truth that any sort of faculty — or nonschools, similar to an unaccredited storefront microschool, a web based curriculum supplier, a music camp or even a ski slope — might be eligible for these funds.
These faculties and organizations don’t must abide by state or federal legal guidelines, like these requiring lodging for college students with disabilities or different antidiscrimination legal guidelines. A 2022 Supreme Courtroom determination, Carson v. Makin, affirmed the suitable of fogeys to make use of public cash, within the type of voucher and training financial savings account funds, particularly for spiritual faculties.
And certainly, plainly in New Hampshire, as nationally, a disproportionate quantity of the funding goes to small Christian faculties, notably to evangelical Protestant faculties like Laconia. The Harmony Monitor discovered that previously 4 years, 90 % of the income from the earlier, income-capped EFA program went to Christian faculties. This was true despite the fact that a lot of the state’s personal faculties will not be spiritual. The Harmony Monitor discovered within the first 5 years of this system, the highest 10 recipients grew in enrollment by 32 %. Except for Laconia, none of those faculties responded to repeated requests for remark from The Hechinger Report.
However state officers have stopped releasing information on precisely the place recipients of the Training Freedom Accounts are utilizing these {dollars}. They instructed the Harmony Monitor that the information shouldn’t be topic to public document requests as a result of it’s held by the nonprofit that administers the funds, the Kids’s Scholarship Fund of New Hampshire. State officers didn’t reply to Hechinger queries. The Kids’s Scholarship Fund directed The Hechinger Report back to its web site, which includes a partial accounting of lower than 10 % of 2025-26 pupil. This accounting, which can or is probably not consultant, confirmed 671 of those college students at the moment attend Christian faculties, 64 attend non-Christian personal faculties and 50 are homeschooled.
A nationwide evaluation launched in September by Tulane’s Harris of publicly accessible information confirmed that in New Hampshire and ten different states with comparable insurance policies, vouchers have boosted personal faculty enrollment by as much as 4 %. The will increase have been concentrated at small Protestant spiritual faculties like Laconia. The federal tax credit score scholarship program will permit much more funds in further states to be directed to those faculties.
One purpose that Christian faculties are popping out on high, Harris stated, is that the sort of faculty tends to have decrease tuition than impartial personal faculties, that means a $5,000 subsidy could make the distinction for extra households. The faculties do that partly by paying lecturers much less.
“ Sometimes, Christian faculty lecturers see their work as a ministry and are keen to work for considerably lower than their public counterparts,” stated Duba, Laconia’s chief. He added that he’s working along with his board to attempt to pay a “residing wage” of $55,000.
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On the Christmas live performance in Laconia, after the fireplace division gave the all clear and the efficiency resumed, the little ones have been tuckered out from the additional pleasure. Within the theater foyer, Nick Ballentine cradled his kindergartner, Perna, who wore two large purple bows in her hair and a costume that learn “Merry” on the entrance in cursive.
Ballentine stated his household selected Laconia as a result of “it was native and it wasn’t a public faculty.” He additionally favored that it was Christian and had small class sizes, however his opposition to public faculty is staunch: “I don’t like public faculties, nor the insurance policies that information them, as a result of they arrive from the federal government.”
Duba stated that households come to Laconia for the small class sizes, the TimberNook outside program that has elementary faculty college students spending 5 hours every week of sophistication time within the woods, and “ for religion.”
“They do not need their children in public faculties the place their children are being taught by individuals who do not categorical religion in Christ,” he stated. Whereas the varsity doesn’t require college students to have a “occupation of religion” to attend, there are classes concerning the lifetime of Jesus in preschool, every day prayers and repair mission journeys for the highschool college students as distant as Rwanda.
Duba stated the most important “social situation” that drives households away from public faculties and towards faculties like his is “ sexuality and gender id.” The Harmony Monitor beforehand reported that most of the faculties which can be the highest recipients of support in New Hampshire will not admit college students who’ve anybody of their household who’s brazenly LGBTQ+ or helps homosexual or trans rights. Laconia Christian Academy’s nondiscrimination coverage says it doesn’t discriminate on the idea of race, coloration, nationwide and ethnic origin, but it surely doesn’t point out sexual orientation or gender id. Requested concerning the coverage, Duba declined to remark.
Like different personal faculties, these faculties additionally aren’t required by legislation to serve college students who’ve disabilities. The state says 8.47 % of EFA recipients are in particular training, in comparison with 20 % within the state’s public faculties.
Adam Laats, an training historian at Binghamton College, stated these common faculty alternative packages are a part of an extended historical past of conservative evangelical Protestants searching for to make current public faculties extra Christian in character on the one hand and divert public cash to explicitly Christian faculties on the opposite.
“For 100 years, public faculties have been the form of litmus take a look at of whether or not the U.S. is a Christian nation,” he stated, citing battles over instructing evolution, intercourse training, prayer in faculties and extra just lately local weather change, the remedy of race and American historical past, LGBTQIA rights and e-book banning.
Alongside the tradition wars in public faculties, stated Laats, there have been successive waves of founding and growth of Christian personal faculties: “There’s a burst within the Nineteen Twenties, the following large bump comes within the ’50s and an enormous spike within the Nineteen Seventies, through the top of busing, when for some time there was one new faculty opening a day within the U.S. of those conservative evangelical faculties.”
Laats agrees with Harris that the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Seventies booms have been partly responses to desegregation efforts. However, he stated, earlier enrollment booms have ultimately light, as a result of “it’s costly” to teach college students and provide facilities like sports activities and humanities training. “That’s why the Christians have pushed onerous for vouchers.”
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Funding equity is a hot-button situation proper now in New Hampshire.
In the summertime of 2025, the State Supreme Courtroom discovered that New Hampshire’s faculties are formally inadequately funded. College funding within the low-tax, live-free-or-die state relies upon closely on native property taxes, which differ radically space to space. The state spends a mean of 4,182 per head; the courtroom discovered it ought to spend at the least $7,356.
To date, the general proportion of New Hampshire college students enrolled in public faculties has remained regular at 90 %. That means a lot of the ESA cash, to date, is subsidizing households who already have been selecting personal faculties or homeschooling, relatively than fueling a mass exodus from public faculties.
But some districts are feeling the chew. Based on just lately launched information from the state, within the small city of Rindge, 29 % of scholars are EFA recipients — the best of any neighborhood within the state.
“It’s taking cash away from public training,” stated Megan Tuttle, president of New Hampshire’s state trainer union. “When you have a pair children which can be leaving the classroom to take the cash, that does not change the staffing that now we have on the faculties, warmth, oil, electrical energy, all these forms of issues. And so, what’s taking place is the cash’s leaving, however the payments aren’t.”
Duba appears to be like on the math in another way, mentioning that the EFA doesn’t equal the complete price of training a pupil. “Let’s say I took 30 children from Laconia. I didn’t, however for the sake of argument,” he stated. “ They do not must do something with these 30 children anymore. They’re gone.”
This yr, the advocacy group Reaching Greater NH calculated that the training financial savings account program will siphon $50 million from the state’s $2.61 billion training belief fund, and it’ll develop from there. “We’re functionally making an attempt to fund two techniques,” stated Alex Tilsey, the group’s coverage director. “And we couldn’t even fund one system absolutely.”
As this system grows in New Hampshire, the opposition is rising too.
“There’s broad opposition to EFAs from the trainer unions, from public faculty teams and from voters,” sums up Tilsey. “It’s not usually talking a extremely favored coverage throughout the state.” However with a Republican trifecta in command of state authorities, faculty alternative in New Hampshire shouldn’t be going anyplace. And with a nationwide training tax credit score program within the offing, extra states will quickly face these debates. As in New Hampshire, the federal cash will have the ability to be used for personal faculties, homeschooling prices or something in between.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, by way of Sign at CarolineP.83 or on e-mail at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Christian faculties was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, impartial information group targeted on inequality and innovation in training. Join the Hechinger publication.
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