Demers: The Story Behind NH's 12,500 Education Freedom Accounts

By Kate Baker Demers, NH Journal

New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program has reached its current enrollment cap of 12,500 students, with another 943 eligible students already waiting for an opportunity to participate as of Aug. 13. The milestone is notable for its size, but the more important story is how New Hampshire got here: one family, one child, and one educational decision at a time.

Behind every EFA is a family that looked at a child’s education and decided to seek something different: a different school, homeschooling, tutoring, educational therapies, specialized curriculum, online learning, or some combination of those options. The circumstances are different from one family to the next, but each family’s journey began in much the same place, with a parent asking what their child needs and searching for an educational path that could provide it.

That is what makes 12,500 more than an enrollment milestone. Education Freedom Accounts remain the subject of political debate in Concord, but thousands of New Hampshire families have been making judgments of their own, not at a polling place, but around kitchen tables and based on the needs of individual children.

Those decisions have added up. Families continued applying after enrollment reached the previous cap of 10,000 students, prompting the state to increase capacity by 25%. Families filled all 2,500 additional spaces, and now another waitlist has formed. Five years into the program, after two enrollment caps have been reached and two waitlists have formed, this looks less like a policy and more like a pattern.

Education policy is often debated in the language of programs, budgets, and systems, but parents experience education at the level of an individual child. Their questions are more personal: Is my child safe? Is she learning? Is he confident? Is this environment bringing out the best in them? And, ultimately, is there another educational path that might better meet their needs?

For Kristen and Danny Rivera, those questions led them to search for an environment where their son Zekey could feel comfortable, build confidence, and enjoy school. After trying different approaches, including homeschooling, they found a good fit at Meeting House Montessori School. His mother describes a child who now comes home smiling and eager to talk about his day, while Zekey says knowing his classmates and teachers helps him feel more at ease. EFA and scholarship assistance helped put that option within his family’s reach.

Trinity’s circumstances were different, but her family’s search grew from the same desire to find an environment where their child could flourish. Her father, Robert Duryea, had watched her struggle with bullying and become increasingly overlooked and withdrawn. He began preparing to homeschool her because he did not see another realistic option, while a private school where Trinity could feel safe, supported, and known seemed financially out of reach.

EFA and scholarship assistance changed what was possible. Trinity enrolled at St. Catherine of Siena School in Manchester and found the sense of belonging her father had been searching for; since then, she has earned a 98 cumulative average, won a spelling bee, spoken at her sixth-grade graduation and been accepted to Holy Family Academy.

Zekey and Trinity are two children among 12,500, and their stories do not represent every EFA family, nor should they. Their differences are the point. Children struggle for different reasons, learn in different ways, and thrive in different environments. Multiply those individual circumstances by 12,500, and the enrollment figure begins to mean something very different.

Some families are looking for a safer environment, some need specialized instruction or tutoring, some choose to homeschool, and others have found a school where their child is thriving but need help making it financially possible. Each choice is deeply personal, but taken together, they tell a much larger story.

In that sense, every EFA enrollment is something like a vote cast not at a polling place, but around a kitchen table. The political debate can tell us what lawmakers, advocates and interest groups think about Education Freedom Accounts; enrollment tells us what thousands of families decided when the child sitting across from them was their own.

If the 12,500 students enrolled today demonstrate the choices families have already made, the 943 eligible students currently on the waitlist show that need extends beyond the program’s available capacity. Those students cannot immediately receive their state adequate education grant because the statutory enrollment cap has been reached, although state law preserves priority in enrollment for returning EFA students, their siblings, students with disabilities, and families at or below 350% of the federal poverty level.

The fact that another waitlist has formed is especially significant because we have seen this before. When enrollment reached the previous cap of 10,000 students, families continued to apply. State law subsequently allowed capacity to grow by 25%, opening another 2,500 spaces; families filled every one of them, and now hundreds more are waiting again.

That sequence is difficult to dismiss as a temporary surge of interest. New Hampshire filled one cap, expanded capacity and filled the next, only to see another waitlist form. Hundreds of families are now choosing to wait rather than walk away.

That repeated cycle of need and expansion is not incidental to the program’s design; it is precisely how lawmakers intended future growth to work. When they passed Senate Bill 295 in 2025, they created a measured mechanism under which reaching at least 90% of the existing enrollment cap triggers a 25% increase in maximum enrollment the following year. That mechanism took the program from 10,000 available accounts to 12,500, and reaching the current threshold is expected to increase capacity again for the 2027-28 school year.

The legislature therefore did not create an unlimited program, but one whose capacity responds to demonstrated family demand. Growth follows participation rather than projections: Additional space becomes available because families actually choose to participate.

The same legislation broadened who could apply by making EFA eligibility universal, but the subsequent growth did not fundamentally change who the program serves. More than 75% of today’s EFA students qualified under the income limits, meaning economically challenged families remain the overwhelming majority of participants today.

New Hampshire expanded access without displacing or leaving behind the economically challenged families the program has always served, while retaining priority in enrollment for lower-income families, students with disabilities, returning participants and their siblings. The result is a program that can welcome more families while remaining rooted in the population it served from the beginning, with future capacity tied not to projections about what families might want, but to the choices families actually make.

Taken together, those choices now give us something we did not have when Education Freedom Accounts began five years ago: a record of how New Hampshire families respond when given greater agency over their children’s education.

Education Freedom Accounts will continue to be debated in Concord, as education policy always has been. But that debate no longer takes place only in the realm of predictions about what families might do or arguments about what they should want; we can look at what they have actually done.

Families filled the first 10,000-student cap and kept applying. When another 2,500 spaces became available, they filled those too, and today another 943 eligible students are waiting for an opportunity to participate. Behind those numbers are children like Zekey and Trinity and thousands of other families whose reasons belong to them. They did not all choose the same school or the same kind of education or arrive at an EFA for the same reason; they chose what they believed would work for their children.

At what point does a program stop being treated as a policy experiment and start being recognized as an established part of New Hampshire’s educational landscape? After five years, two filled enrollment caps, two waitlists, and thousands of individual family decisions, a clear pattern has emerged.

The debate over Education Freedom Accounts will continue in Concord, but around kitchen tables across New Hampshire, families have already been casting their own votes.

Kate Baker Demers is Executive Director of Children's Scholarship Fund NH. She wrote this for NHJournal.com.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.