LEBANON — Just two weeks after appointing her to the position, the members of New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Savings Account oversight committee removed state Sen. Sue Prentiss, D-Lebanon, as chairwoman at a Tuesday meeting.
The five-member EFA oversight committee met for the first time in a year on Dec. 16 and in an unexpected move opted to appoint Democrat and vocal EFA critic Prentiss as chairwoman of the committee. Republicans, who broadly support the program that pays grants to families that homeschool or rely on private education options, control both the House and Senate in the New Hampshire statehouse.
Rep. Rick Ladd, R-Haverhill, was not present at the meeting.
After being made chairwoman, Prentiss got straight to work setting up this week’s meeting and speaking with New Hampshire’s Commissioner of Education and head of the Children’s Scholarship Fund that administers the program, she said in a Tuesday interview.
But when she arrived for the committee meeting Tuesday morning, she was met with a surprise. Prentiss said another committee member, who she declined to identify, approached her “just minutes before the meeting” and warned her that she was going to be removed as chairwoman because she is a member of the minority party. The EFA committee has three Republicans and two Democrats.
“It’s hard to overlook procedurally how partisan this was in my opinion, and I’ve never been treated this way,” Prentiss said.
The longtime state senator and former Lebanon mayor said she works hard to collaborate across the aisle and “try even when we disagree to get things done.”
“It’s just not the way I work, and I’m deeply disappointed by what I feel is unfair treatment that doesn’t recognize the respect that I have given to all my colleagues in whatever party,” Prentiss said.
Prentiss said the only justification she was given for the ouster is that she is a member of the minority party on the committee, which could cause problems.
To her, the argument doesn’t add up.
When Democrats were in charge of the New Hampshire Senate, Prentiss said, they appointed Republicans to chair senate committees “that had the subject matter expertise or the lived experience to do the job well, so this is not unprecedented and hasn’t been a problem in the past.”
Democrats last controlled the state Senate in 2018.
Senator Ruth Ward, R-Stoddard, made the motion to remove Prentiss as chairwoman Tuesday.
Ward, the former chairwoman of the committee, had approved Prentiss’s nomination at the Dec. 16 meeting. Ward represents the Upper Valley towns of Charlestown, Claremont, Croydon, Newport, Sunapee and Unity.
After removing Prentiss, the committee opted to install Ladd as chairman. He did not respond to a request for comment by phone or email.
Shortly after the Dec. 16 meeting, Ward was told by Senate staff that “procedurally it is not common or not desirable” to have a member of the minority party serve as chair of a legislative committee, she said in a Tuesday interview.
“It generally doesn’t work out well because [the chair is] always going to be against more people,” Ward said. “It was strictly a procedural vote.”
In hindsight Ward, who is “not an expert on procedures,” said it may have made more sense to have postponed the Dec. 16 vote to the next meeting for a “much safer and much cleaner” process.
After she was approached by senate staff, Ward said she discussed the matter again in caucus Tuesday morning and the group decided that as former chairwoman of the committee, she would make the motion to remove Prentiss.
She pointed out that while there have been cases where a minority committee member serves as chair of a legislative committee in New Hampshire, that is the exception rather than the rule. It is often only done, she said, when a legislator has been on a committee for years and is commonly understood to be the best person for the job.
The vote has “nothing to do with being a Republican or being a Democrat,” Ward said.
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