by Anya Kamenetz, The Hechinger Report
January 22, 2026
LACONIA, N.H. — Three dozen 4- and 5-year-olds trooped out onto the stage of the ornate, century-old Colonial Theatre of Laconia in this central New Hampshire town. Dressed in plaid, red, green and sparkles, some were grinning and waving, some looked a bit shell-shocked; a tiny blonde girl sobbed with stage fright in her teacher’s arms.
No sooner did the children open their mouths to sing, “Merry Christmas! … This is the day that the Lord was born!” than the house lights came up and a fire alarm went off.
It was an unusually eventful annual Christmas concert for Laconia Christian Academy. Then again, it’s been an unusually eventful year. In a small, aging state, where overall school enrollment has been dropping for more than two decades, Laconia reported a 130 percent increase in enrollment in its elementary school since 2020 — and began a three-quarter-million-dollar campus expansion on its 140 acres outside town.
“We are in a season of incredible growth,” the school’s website reads.
One reason for the season: Almost every student at the academy is enrolled in New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program, said Head of School Rick Duba. Regardless of their family income, they receive thousands of dollars each in taxpayer money to help pay their tuition.
In June, New Hampshire became the 18th state to pass a universal private school choice program. After signing the bill into law, Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced, “Giving parents the freedom to choose the education setting that best fits their child’s needs will help every student in our state reach their full potential.”
Yet, as these programs proliferate, with significant expansion since the pandemic, Democrats, teachers unions and other public school advocates are raising the alarm about accountability, transparency and funding. And with President Donald Trump passing a federal voucher program to start in 2027, some are concerned about the future of public education as a whole.
“I think these programs are the biggest change in K-12 education since Brown v. Board of Ed,” said Douglas Harris, a scholar at Tulane who recently published two papers on the impact of universal private school choice programs. He argues that vouchers were originally introduced in the 1950s in part to resist desegregation by funding white families to attend private schools.
According to his October 2025 paper, private school choice “allows schools to discriminate against certain students, entwines government with religion, involves a large fiscal cost, and has shown fairly poor, or at best inconclusive, academic results.” Harris said in an interview, “It changes fundamentally all the basic traditions of the education system.”
New Hampshire could be a harbinger of that fundamental change. Experts say the state has one of the broadest and least regulated universal school choice programs in the country. “Universal” refers to the fact that families, regardless of income, are eligible for an average $5,200 a year from the government to pay tuition at a private school or supplement the cost of homeschooling. The number of recipients reached 10,510 this year, and it’s likely to grow again next year.
Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
“Universal” also describes the fact that any type of school — or nonschools, such as an unaccredited storefront microschool, an online curriculum provider, a music camp or even a ski slope — can be eligible for these funds.
These schools and organizations don’t have to abide by state or federal laws, like those requiring accommodation for students with disabilities or other antidiscrimination laws. A 2022 Supreme Court decision, Carson v. Makin, affirmed the right of parents to use public money, in the form of voucher and education savings account funds, specifically for religious schools.
And indeed, it seems that in New Hampshire, as nationally, a disproportionate amount of the funding is going to small Christian schools, particularly to evangelical Protestant schools like Laconia. The Concord Monitor found that in the past four years, 90 percent of the revenue from the previous, income-capped EFA program went to Christian schools. This was true even though most of the state’s private schools are not religious. The Concord Monitor found in the first five years of the program, the top 10 recipients grew in enrollment by 32 percent. With the exception of Laconia, none of these schools responded to repeated requests for comment from The Hechinger Report.
But state officials have stopped releasing data on exactly where recipients of the Education Freedom Accounts are using those dollars. They told the Concord Monitor that the data is not subject to public record requests because it’s held by the nonprofit that administers the funds, the Children’s Scholarship Fund of New Hampshire. State officials did not respond to Hechinger queries. The Children’s Scholarship Fund directed The Hechinger Report to its website, which features a partial accounting of less than 10 percent of 2025-26 student. This accounting, which may or may not be representative, showed 671 of these students currently attend Christian schools, 64 attend non-Christian private schools and 50 are homeschooled.
A national analysis released in September by Tulane’s Harris of publicly available data showed that in New Hampshire and ten other states with similar policies, vouchers have boosted private school enrollment by up to 4 percent. The increases were concentrated at small Protestant religious schools like Laconia. The federal tax credit scholarship program will allow even more funds in additional states to be directed to these schools.
One reason that Christian schools are coming out on top, Harris said, is that this type of school tends to have lower tuition than independent private schools, meaning a $5,000 subsidy can make the difference for more families. The schools do this in part by paying teachers less.
“ Typically, Christian school teachers see their work as a ministry and are willing to work for significantly less than their public counterparts,” said Duba, Laconia’s leader. He added that he is working with his board to try to pay a “living wage” of $55,000.
Related: The new reality with universal school vouchers: Homeschoolers, marketing, pupil churn
At the Christmas concert in Laconia, after the fire department gave the all clear and the performance resumed, the little ones were tuckered out from the extra excitement. In the theater lobby, Nick Ballentine cradled his kindergartner, Perna, who wore two big red bows in her hair and a dress that read “Merry” on the front in cursive.
Ballentine said his family chose Laconia because “it was local and it wasn’t a public school.” He also liked that it was Christian and had small class sizes, but his opposition to public school is staunch: “I don’t like public schools, nor the policies that guide them, because they come from the government.”
Duba said that families come to Laconia for the small class sizes, the TimberNook outdoor program that has elementary school students spending five hours each week of class time in the woods, and “ for faith.”
“They don’t want their kids in public schools where their kids are being taught by people who don’t express faith in Christ,” he said. While the school doesn’t require students to have a “profession of faith” to attend, there are lessons about the life of Jesus in preschool, daily prayers and service mission trips for the high school students as far away as Rwanda.
Duba said the biggest “social issue” that drives families away from public schools and toward schools like his is “ sexuality and gender identity.” The Concord Monitor previously reported that many of the schools that are the top recipients of aid in New Hampshire won’t admit students who have anyone in their family who is openly LGBTQ+ or supports gay or trans rights. Laconia Christian Academy’s nondiscrimination policy says it does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, but it doesn’t mention sexual orientation or gender identity. Asked about the policy, Duba declined to comment.
Like other private schools, these schools also aren’t required by law to serve students who have disabilities. The state says 8.47 percent of EFA recipients are in special education, compared to 20 percent in the state’s public schools.
Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said these universal school choice programs are part of a long history of conservative evangelical Protestants seeking to make existing public schools more Christian in character on the one hand and divert public money to explicitly Christian schools on the other.
“For 100 years, public schools have been the sort of litmus test of whether the U.S. is a Christian nation,” he said, citing battles over teaching evolution, sex education, prayer in schools and more recently climate change, the treatment of race and American history, LGBTQIA rights and book banning.
Alongside the culture wars in public schools, said Laats, there have been successive waves of founding and expansion of Christian private schools: “There’s a burst in the 1920s, the next big bump comes in the ’50s and a huge spike in the 1970s, during the height of busing, when for a while there was one new school opening a day in the U.S. of these conservative evangelical schools.”
Laats agrees with Harris that the 1950s and 1970s booms were in part responses to desegregation efforts. But, he said, previous enrollment booms have eventually faded, because “it’s expensive” to educate students and offer amenities like sports and arts education. “That’s why the Christians have pushed hard for vouchers.”
Related: Arizona gave families public money for private school. Then private schools raised tuition
Funding fairness is a hot-button issue right now in New Hampshire.
In the summer of 2025, the State Supreme Court found that New Hampshire’s schools are officially inadequately funded. School funding in the low-tax, live-free-or-die state depends heavily on local property taxes, which vary radically area to area. The state spends an average of 4,182 per head; the court found it should spend at least $7,356.
So far, the overall percentage of New Hampshire students enrolled in public schools has remained steady at 90 percent. That implies most of the ESA money, so far, is subsidizing families who already were choosing private schools or homeschooling, rather than fueling a mass exodus from public schools.
Yet some districts are feeling the bite. According to recently released data from the state, in the small town of Rindge, 29 percent of students are EFA recipients — the highest of any community in the state.
“It is taking money away from public education,” said Megan Tuttle, president of New Hampshire’s state teacher union. “If you have a couple kids that are leaving the classroom to take the money, that doesn’t change the staffing that we have at the schools, heat, oil, electricity, all those types of things. And so, what’s happening is the money’s leaving, but the bills aren’t.”
Duba looks at the math differently, pointing out that the EFA doesn’t equal the full cost of educating a student. “Let’s say I took 30 kids from Laconia. I did not, but for the sake of argument,” he said. “ They don’t have to do anything with those 30 kids anymore. They’re gone.”
This year, the advocacy group Reaching Higher NH calculated that the education savings account program will siphon $50 million from the state’s $2.61 billion education trust fund, and it will grow from there. “We’re functionally trying to fund two systems,” said Alex Tilsley, the group’s policy director. “And we couldn’t even fund one system fully.”
As the program grows in New Hampshire, the opposition is growing too.
“There’s broad opposition to EFAs from the teacher unions, from public school groups and from voters,” sums up Tilsley.* “It’s not generally speaking a highly favored policy across the state.” But with a Republican trifecta in control of state government, school choice in New Hampshire is not going anywhere. And with a national education tax credit program in the offing, more states will soon face these debates. As in New Hampshire, the federal money will be able to be used for private schools, homeschooling costs or anything in between.
*Correction: This sentence has been updated to correct the spelling of Alex Tilsley’s last name.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This story about Christian schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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