Education Across the States — Opinion
None of this is a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of arithmetic — and the arithmetic belongs to the governor.
By Charles Mayfield, Executive Producer, Education Across the States · October 29, 2026
On November 3, New Hampshire voters will decide a governor's race and, on the same ballot, whether their communities adopt state-designed tax caps on their school districts. Before voting to ratify two years of education policy — and to lock its logic into local budgets — it is worth examining what those two years have delivered. Start with the smallest office in the story.
The Office of the Advocate for Special Education is a small state office with statutory duties under RSA 186-C:38. Its caseload rose from 40 cases in 2023–24 to more than 300 cases in 2024–25. Facing that surge, the office asked for approximately $740,000 for fiscal 2026 and five staff members in total, and it told the Legislature plainly that its statutory duties cannot be accomplished with less staffing. The budget Governor Kelly Ayotte signed gave the office $395,649 — about 53 percent of what it asked for as its minimum — and zero new positions. An office the law charges with protecting students with disabilities was funded at half strength, and told, in effect, to make do.
Then there are the Education Freedom Accounts. On June 10, 2025, Governor Ayotte signed SB 295, which removed the program's income cap and made school vouchers universal. In 2025–26, 10,510 students enrolled. The fiscal 2026 cost came to $51,619,550 against $39.3 million budgeted — $12.3 million over budget. And who used the money? Only 343 of those 10,510 students, 3.3 percent, had switched from a public school. The other 96.7 percent were already enrolled in private school or homeschooled; the state simply picked up a bill their families were already paying. The share of participating students from low-income families fell from 39 percent to 19 percent. By August 13, 2026, the program had already reached its 12,500-student enrollment cap for 2026–27.
This year, the governor signed HB 1817, which allows EFA students to take courses and join cocurricular programs in their local public school districts free of charge. Critics call it double-dipping, and the description fits the arrangement: public money pays for private schooling, and the public school provides its courses and programs on top, free.
The courts, meanwhile, have told the state that its core obligation remains unmet. On July 1, 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held in the ConVal case that base adequacy aid is unconstitutionally low, naming $7,356.01 per pupil as the conservative minimum — a gap of more than $500 million a year. The governor's response, issued the same day, was: "The court reached the wrong decision today." Her legislative answer, HB 1815, signed March 27, 2026, redefines adequacy on paper and adds no aid. And on August 14, 2026, her administration filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Claremont school-funding decisions outright.
While Concord redefined its obligations, districts absorbed the consequences. The signed fiscal 2026–27 budget cut school building aid by about $60 million, a reduction of 69 percent, and funded no new building-aid projects. A total of 145 municipalities received less state adequacy aid in fiscal 2026 than in fiscal 2025. Nashua cut 56 positions, including 21 teachers, for 2026–27. Manchester eliminated 41 positions, and its fiscal 2027 budget sits about $13 million below the minimum its superintendent said was needed to avoid layoffs.
To be fair, one number moved in the right direction: special education aid increased by $32.0 million, a 47.2 percent increase, to $99.8 million over the biennium, and SB 292 now sets a floor of 80 percent of entitlement for catastrophic aid. That increase is real, and it should be acknowledged. But a floor is a promise, and the state's most recent record on that promise is this: in fiscal 2025, districts claimed $50.3 million in catastrophic aid, and the state paid $33.9 million — 67.5 percent of its promised share — leaving districts to absorb a $16.4 million shortfall. The pattern holds wherever you look: the obligation is announced, and the follow-through falls short.
Now the governor has signed HB 1300 — on July 15, 2026 — which places a state-designed local tax cap on the November 3, 2026 ballot in every municipality in New Hampshire. Districts that have run the numbers project what adoption would mean locally: roughly $2 million in cuts in Londonderry and about $1.4 million in Bedford. Those are projections, not certainties, but they come from the districts that would have to live under the caps.
That is what November 3 asks New Hampshire to ratify: a voucher program running over budget and serving mostly families already outside the public schools, a constitutional obligation answered with a redefinition, a special education watchdog funded at half its stated minimum, and tax caps that would lock the resulting shortfalls in place. None of this is a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of arithmetic — and the arithmetic belongs to the governor.
This piece rests on the following primary sources and analyses.