More than 250 students in Rindge have been approved to use a state-funded voucher program to attend nonpublic schools — the most of any town in the Monadnock region.

That number is a fraction of the 13,836 students statewide who applied and have been deemed eligible to pay for their education using New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Accounts, or EFAs, according to a recently published live data dashboard from the Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire, the nonprofit that manages the program.

Established in 2021, the EFA program uses public funds to help parents pay for nonpublic, K-12 education options, like school tuition (including for private or religious schools), online programs, textbooks or internet and computers “that are primarily used to help meet an EFA student’s educational needs,” according to the program’s parent handbook.

Proponents argue EFAs give parents more say in their child’s education, while opponents argue the program siphons taxpayer money from an already underfunded public education system that most students attend.

This year, the program reached its cap of 12,500 students, but more are exempted from the cap because they are members of families at or below 350 percent of the poverty level, are students or siblings of students renewing their membership, or have a documented disability with a public school, not including 504 plans or private schools IEPs or ISPs, according to the organization’s website.

The Monadnock region has 1,353 students approved for an EFA as of midday Tuesday, accounting for roughly 10 percent of the statewide total, per the dashboard. There are 252 students in Rindge using EFAs, followed by 143 students in Keene, 127 in Peterborough, 84 in Swanzey and 82 in Hillsborough.

In smaller towns, the number of students using EFA makes up a larger proportion of students. There are 320 students using EFAs in both Jaffrey and Rindge, while the Jaffrey-Rindge Cooperative School District served 1,001 K-12 students last year, according to the district’s 2026 annual report.

The dashboard indicates that 10,578 students — roughly 75 percent of the total — qualified for the program because of income, while 1,478 students have special needs. As of Tuesday, 552 students were on the waitlist.

At the beginning of the 2025-26 school year, there were 160,323 students enrolled in public schools and public charter schools in New Hampshire, according to a Nov. 14, 2025 news release from the state’s education department.

In June 2025, the N.H. Legislature expanded eligibility for the program to families of all income levels.

Over the past few years, most newcomers to the program were not attending public school beforehand. The vast majority of students who joined the program in the 2025-26 school year weren’t attending public school before – only about 7 percent switched from public school after the 2024-25 school year, according to N.H. Department of Education data.

In March, several towns across the state passed petition warrant articles on their ballots calling on legislators to limit EFA usage to “families with demonstrated financial need” and require that voucher recipients “provide fiscal and educational performance reports comparable to those required of public schools.” Following that push, a bipartisan group of legislators in the N.H. House have called for more oversight on the program, the N.H. Bulletin reported in June.

The data dashboard is available at: nhefa.scholarshipfund.org

Noah Diedrich can be reached at 603-355-8569, or ndiedrich@keenesentinel.com.

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