Concord mother Wendy Santiago said that when her son, Noah, attended a public charter school in the area, he sometimes came home with ripped pants and injuries from bullying.

Strafford parent Michelle Wangerin said her daughter, Sarah, steadily lost opportunities to take a foreign language and participate in an innovative engineering program as funding for her public school dwindled.

At their wits ends with public schools they believed were failing their families, both families ultimately decided to pull their children out and try something new. Santiago began to home-school Noah, now 16, while Wangerin enrolled Sarah, now 10, in a private school over a half hour from their home.

When New Hampshire’s education freedom account program launched in 2021, the Santiagos took advantage of it to help defray their new educational expenses. The Wangerins currently make too much money to qualify for the program, though the private Christian school Sarah attends is among the top 10 recipients of EFA dollars.

As lawmakers contemplate eliminating the income eligibility requirements for the school voucher program that prevent the Wangerins from receiving funds, both mothers and their children showed up on Thursday to testify at a hearing on the bill.

However, despite making similar educational choices, the two families offered starkly different opinions about a potential expansion of the program.

“Unfortunately it is necessary to have a program like EFA to support the needs of these children who seek alternative schooling so they can avoid being abused at school,” Santiago said.

Wangerin saw it differently. She, like others in attendance, wants to see the state use the money to better support public education. 

“Passage of this bill would allow us to mostly resume our pre-private school lifestyle, but is that really how the state should be spending taxpayer dollars?” she asked, referencing the season ski passes her family would buy if the state covered some of her daughter’s tuition.

“If there is state money available to spend on education … I think most taxpayers would agree that money is better spent giving families a choice to access quality education in their local communities,” she added.

Their views epitomized what was framed Thursday as a choice between the well-being of individual students on one hand and strong public schools on the other.

The expansion of the program contemplated in House Bill 115 would allow every family to receive at least $4,265.64 per year to spend on educational expenses for each of their children who does not attend public school. A school district would lose a corresponding amount of money for each of its students who exits the public school system.

The cost of the school choice program would likely rise to over $100 million per year, which is not going to fund public education, according to an analysis conducted by the public education policy organization Reaching Higher NH.

Proponents of the program have argued that the loss of state funds would be offset by the declining enrollment of students who opt to leave the public school system, citing the statewide average cost per pupil in public schools, which has soared to over $21,000.

As scores of parents, students, and educational leaders in the state spoke about the proposed expansion of the school voucher program over the course of several hours, it became clear that the bill is seen by many as representing a fundamental choice about the future of education in the state: Should New Hampshire be a state where students are financially supported to pursue the educational opportunities that best fit their needs or should it be one that better supports public schools?

“Parents who determine that it is in the best interest of their children and for society in general that their children be educated outside the chaos of the local public school have to make many sacrifices to afford both the taxes that they pay for the public schools their children do not attend and the tuition that they have decided is best for their children,” said Jennifer Black, a mother of six children in Windham who attend what she described as a small Christian school.

Nearly every opponent of the expansion discussed the increasingly challenging financial situations faced by many public school districts.

“Before funding private education for the wealthiest in our state, we should do the bare minimum and fund public education first,” said state Rep. Heath Howard of Strafford.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.