The Blue View: School voucher bill is a missile aimed at the heart of NH public education

By Eric Schildge

Originally published January 12, 2022 in Seacoast Online.

The pandemic has made it clear that public schools are essential to holding our communities together and strengthening our democracy. From feeding our kids to hosting our elections, we count on public schools to provide a high-quality education to our children as well as meet the most basic needs of personal and civic life.

We’ve learned over the last twenty months that the more well-funded a school, the more likely it is to be able to meet the needs of its students and the community. After all of this disrupted learning and a bitter political fight over whether and how to make our schools more welcoming and inclusive places to teach and learn, New Hampshire public schools face their biggest threat yet.

Last November, the House Education Committee voted to approve the most extreme school voucher bill in the country. It proposes to give every resident the opportunity to withdraw an average of $10,000 from their local school budget every year for each of their children in the K-12 education system. It includes no requirements for the groups that receive these funds to offer any specific services or curriculum, and it imposes no limits on income or wealth for the families that take this money from their local public schools.

What’s more, once a family chooses to withdraw those funds, they are eligible for them each year until that child graduates. For example, a family who receives a $10,000 voucher for their child in first grade would be entitled to receive $120,000 over the course of the next twelve years, whether or not the program is continued or whether the town’s property taxpayers can afford it. A family of four would be able to take nearly a half-million dollars of local tax dollars intended to fund their local public school!

Put simply, this bill is a missile aimed directly at the heart of public education in New Hampshire. It threatens the wellbeing of our community by robbing our public schools of much-needed funding, leaving our special needs children without adequate support in their schools, placing a greater burden on all of us to cover the inevitable increase in property taxes, and ultimately sending our public school system into a tailspin from which it may never recover.

Many people have been making strong arguments about the dangers of draining funds from our local public schools, but I want to take a moment to make the case for why our local schools deserve every dollar we send their way, and why it is more important than ever that we fully fund our schools by opposing this bill and voting yes on teacher contracts and school budgets this March.

Public schools open their doors to every child. They are one of the few places in our state where young people from all walks of life can come together to grow and learn. That means that the many students who would be turned away or who would never even think to apply to a parochial or private school are welcome in our public schools, no matter who they are, what they believe, and what challenges they face. For example, at the school where I teach, we have students withprofound disabilities who require intense and costly care. We provide it because it is our obligation as a public school to teach every child in our community. Even more importantly, we know that supporting these students benefits everyone in our community by sending a clear message that everyone deserves a chance to grow and thrive.

I am proud of my town’s history as the site of the state’s first public school. I want to live in a community that continues to care for every one of its children. I don’t want to live in a community where each family is encouraged to get theirs while the getting is good while forsaking other people’s children to deal with the aftermath in an underfunded school.

I have hope that our elected representatives care as much as I do about our community's greatest asset, and I implore them to oppose this bill for the sake of my family and all our neighbors in Hampton. If they do vote for this bill, I encourage all of us to make our voices heard at the ballot box by voting to fully fund our schools and electing representatives that will fight for fair and adequate school funding in N.H.!

Eric Schildge, of Hampton, is a member of the Hampton Town Democratic Committee.