Santos: A Special Education Journey Led Our Family To An Education Freedom Account

By Kelly Santos, NH Journal

Recent coverage of New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program has focused heavily on oversight, funding, and students with disabilities.

As I followed those stories, I was struck by how inaccurate some of the reporting was and how little attention was paid to why families choose these programs in the first place.

Contrary to the impression left by some coverage, students receiving EFA disability funding are required to provide documentation establishing eligibility, and EFA students must demonstrate an annual form of academic attainment.

But those policy debates only tell part of the story. The more important story is why families like mine felt the need to look beyond the traditional system in the first place.

As the mother of two children with disabilities, I did not set out looking for an alternative to public school. We turned to the EFA program only after years of trying to secure the support our son needed.

After years of evaluations, meetings, and advocacy, our son’s public school issued a Written Prior Notice stating that “the district proposes not to accept your child’s disabilities at this time.” For our family, that was a turning point.

We could continue spending time, money, and emotional energy fighting for services, or we could look for another path. We explored every option we could find. We did not win a charter school lottery, moving to another town was not realistic, and private school tuition was beyond our reach.

Then we discovered Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire and learned that our family qualified for both an Education Freedom Account and an Education Tax Credit scholarship. Those programs allowed us to access and enroll our son in a private school that better met his needs, while we continued to pay a portion of the tuition ourselves.

The difference was remarkable. My son described his new school as “the key that let me out of jail.” That is why some of the recent discussion feels incomplete to me.

Much of the debate has focused on whether the EFA program operates like a public school special education system. It doesn’t. Public schools and EFAs serve different purposes. Public schools provide services and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. EFAs are a tool families can use to move their child to a more appropriate educational setting at their own expense when the current setting is not meeting the child’s needs.

In our case, our family ultimately gave up those protections because the public school refused to recognize our son’s disabilities. No family should have to face that choice.

I would also encourage policymakers to recognize that when a child leaves the public school system and no longer has an IEP, the traditional measures used to track special education progress no longer exist. That reality is not unique to EFAs; it is true regardless of whether a child attends a private school, homeschools, or learns in another educational setting.

For our family, that option changed the trajectory of our son’s education.

Ours is just one family’s story, and I recognize it will not be every family’s story. Some families are looking for a safer environment. Others need academic support or educational options they cannot find elsewhere. There isn’t one type of EFA family. There are thousands of them.

What I can tell you is that families are not choosing EFAs because they want to undermine public schools.

EFA families are Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Many of us continue to have children enrolled in public schools and appreciate the teachers and staff who work hard every day on behalf of students.

My husband and I certainly do. We support the protections provided by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Children with disabilities have the legal right to be included in regular education classrooms whenever possible.

At the same time, we also know that no single educational setting works for every child. Families who choose alternatives to their assigned public school always continue contributing local tax dollars that support their community’s public schools. Supporting educational options for families and supporting public education are not mutually exclusive goals.

Our family spent years seeking help. We worked with the Parent Information Center, the Department of Education, advocates, specialists, and educators. I attended training programs, became a volunteer parent advocate, and spent countless hours learning how to navigate educational systems and support my children.

Like many parents of children with disabilities, I did everything I could to help my children succeed in public school. Along the way, I became uniquely qualified to identify resources and educational settings that best met their individual needs.

People will continue debating EFAs, oversight, and education policy. That’s fine. But those conversations should include the voices of the families who rely on these programs.

For our family, the EFA program was not about politics. It was about finding an educational setting where our son could thrive when other options were not working.

I hope more EFA families tell their stories. Whether people support or oppose the program, they deserve to hear from the families actually using it. It’s easy to talk about programs and numbers. It’s harder to remember that real families are making these decisions one child at a time.

That’s what we did, and we remain grateful that the option existed when our family needed it.

Kelly Santos is an EFA parent who lives in Hudson, 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.