Shaylyn Maran

I strongly oppose HB 1401. New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program is strong because it is administered by the Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF). CSF is a locally based New Hampshire non-profit whose mission is to support parents as the primary directors of their children’s education. That structure is intentional. It protects families. Families value that. By law, the administering organization must safeguard student data, destroy qualifying financial documentation, provide full transparency on administrative costs and salaries (publicly posted without special request), and oversee every purchase and reimbursement. There has been no fraud. The program works. These safeguards are not incidental — they are the reason families trust it. Educational Freedom Accounts exist because parental trust in the public education system has eroded. Schools today are philosophically different from decades past. Undeniably increasing politicization within the school system has divided communities and driven many families to seek alternatives. Nationally, about 70% of public school teachers belong to unions, and in recent election cycles the two largest teachers’ unions directed roughly 98–99% of their political contributions to Democratic candidates and causes. Whether one agrees with those political positions or not, many Republican and conservatives, and families with traditional values are leaving public education in significant numbers because they rightly perceive those spaces as politically against their values rather than neutral and representative of all families. I have seen this personally. One of our children came home saying he “wishes he wasn’t white.” Another was left behind academically due to unproven instructional methods. Another felt isolated after an interaction in class when he shared having gone to church over the weekend, “no one in my class goes to church or believes in God.” I have spoken with a local teacher who felt expressing conservative views among her professional peers, who share their liberal ones openly, would risk professional isolation. These experiences are why families seek options. EFAs restore trust because they are transparent, locally administered, and structurally designed to protect parental authority. Families turned to this program as a refuge from systems they no longer felt welcome within, or which no longer align with their values. HB 1401 risks eroding that very trust. Allowing a large, multi-state for-profit corporation to administer the program is a fundamental shift in the motives of the administrators of the program whom parents trust. This is a proposed structural shift away from a mission-driven New Hampshire non-profit and toward a corporate contractor whose priority is revenue, not families. The current system is transparent. It is accountable. It is fraud-free. It is rooted locally. There is no demonstration of failure by CSF which requires this overhaul. Prudence should guide us, not a view for expansion and profit. Republican leadership has rightly championed parental rights, local control, and educational freedom. Preserving the integrity of this program is consistent with those principles. Altering it in a way that erodes parents’ trust, weakens safeguards, and changes the motivations of the administrative entity is not. This bill will do just that. Protect what is working. Protect the trust families have placed in this program. Reject HB 1401.