Jennifer Barriere

This bill will be catastrophic to areas hit the hardest with our state’s inadequate education funding by removing local tax dollars as well as state aid. When 10 children decide to use this local EFA, that doesn’t mean that a school district will be able to let go staff members because those children will be from different grades, classes, and schools. The cost of running our schools will stay the same, but with less revenue. As a result, towns will need to increase local taxes and get rid of programming that many families rely on like sports, theater, and CTE programming. This bill ignores the true definition of a public school district’s “cost per pupil” by pretending there is a dollar amount attached to each child; It assumes that local taxes that go to public schools are only for those residents who have children in the schools; it forgets that NH is last in the nation for school spending; and it callously disregards the many NH taxpayers who are already struggling to make ends meet without crushing them with more local taxes. This bill is bad for NH taxpayers and worse for NH’s youngest residents.