Inside EFAs is a Monitor series about New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program. Check out the other stories in the series here.

As Amber MacQuarrie and her two children shuffled from a mold-infested popup camper to a series of dilapidated hotel rooms, they didn’t take the money.

When they finally landed in a home in rural Dublin, a world away from their former city life and support system in Manchester, MacQuarrie continued to turn down the more than $8,000 per year available to them.

For nearly three years – half of which the family spent homeless – MacQuarrie declined to sign up for New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program, caught up in the chaos of housing instability and paralyzed by indecision over which side to choose as New Hampshire’s formerly tight-knit homeschooling community split in two.

By then, MacQuarrie, 37, had been part of that community for over a decade, since shortly after becoming a parent in 2010. Worried about how the rigidity of a public school would sap her son, Ethan, of his curiosity and love of learning, she had turned to a constellation of Facebook groups with all the normal questions: “What about socialization? Why do you think you’re qualified? And what does it actually look like?”

What she learned from veteran homeschooling parents convinced her she could do it. When Ethan and daughter Olive reached school age, MacQuarrie plunged in, leaning on those who had already tread the path before her. As MacQuarrie navigated a sudden divorce, the homeschooling community became her primary source of support and camaraderie – more so, even, than the family’s church.

And then, the very same month in the summer of 2021 that MacQuarrie and her two children lost their home and sole source of income, that community began to fracture.

Since it launched four years ago, the Education Freedom Account program has generated significant controversy across the state, but nowhere have the arguments been as explosive and as personal as among New Hampshire’s thousands of homeschoolers. The program – originally designed to support lower-income families like MacQuarries’ who have decided to take education into their own hands – has divided a community that used to be known above all else for its radical kindness and generosity, interviews with half a dozen people on both sides of the split revealed.

“This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen ever,” said MacQuarrie. “It’s a whole new landscape.”

In Facebook spats, public meetings, and on the opinions pages of the conservative website Granite Grok, the debate over the program has played out behind closed doors and out in the open, pitting those who decide to take the financial support against those who warn that the program could ultimately spell the death of homeschooling in New Hampshire as they know it.

“In every other state that this is happening, the inevitable outcome is the government oversight – because there are strings attached to government money – means more oversight, more regulation, more standards, more accountability,” unfunded homeschooling advocate Amanda Weeden said. “…We want nothing to do with government strings and oversight and the public school standard model.”

Other homeschooling parents, many of whom have signed up for EFAs, accuse people like Weeden of spreading misinformation, fear-mongering, and censoring those who disagree with them.

“The inherent privilege within their stance is disheartening and unfortunate and infuriating,” said MacQuarrie, who ultimately signed up for EFAs for the first time last year. “Because they’re able to homeschool with a level of affluence that others can’t, they are very self-righteous in their thinking.”

Opponents push back that their opinions are fueled by philosophy, not finances.

“It ticks me off that people are like, ‘she is rich and entitled and just a b and she hates us because we’re doing the best for our children,’” Weeden responded.

“It’s just a different decision than mine,” she added. “I’m not here to crap on moms.”

Nowhere to ‘come back to’

The homeschooling community describes New Hampshire’s educational options as existing across four distinct pathways. The first pathway refers to public schools, the second to private schools, the third to homeschoolers who don’t receive government funding, and the fourth to EFA families, which includes both children who are homeschooled and children who attend private school.

The basis of the rift among homeschooling families revolves around the fear that, over time, impositions placed on EFA homeschoolers will seep into the pathway for those who aren’t taking the money.

Though the unfunded homeschoolers operate under an entirely different legal framework than the homeschoolers who receive money through the EFA program, Weeden and others say that lawmakers – and the bills they draft – increasingly lump the two groups together and threaten the freedoms afforded to unfunded families like hers.

“Let’s say this fourth pathway goes wrong – and I believe it will – there has to be a free pathway to come back to,” Weeden, a Rochester resident, said in an interview. “And unless I and people like me protect it and keep it – defend it – there’s not going to be anywhere to come back to.”

Over the last four years, the groups Weeden belongs to have rallied hundreds of people to the State House to take down bills that concern them.

Last year, the biggest legislative threat was a bill that would have implemented a state testing requirement “in all learning environments.” Under the current law, unfunded homeschooling families must maintain a “portfolio” of student work and conduct an “educational evaluation” of some sort each year.

In recent years, one of the groups, Granite State Home Educators, or GSHE, has also successfully fought back against bills that would have required schools and educators who receive government money to conduct criminal history background checks on their employees and volunteers.

“Even though sponsors said it was intended to apply to education providers who use taxpayer funds, the language was overly broad and entangled independent home education families, too,” the group wrote on its website regarding this year’s version of the background check bill.

“The legislative issues have been chronic and nagging,” said Michelle Levell, the director of GSHE. “We have had now three times that a background check bill has been proposed in Concord that we’ll have to fight off. … It gets really old. These should not even be our fights.”

Part of the faction’s vigilance stems from a decades-long history of fights that unfunded homeschoolers have waged in Concord to maintain near-total freedom from government involvement in their children’s education.

“It took 22 years to get us to be able to homeschool our kids at home without government money,” said Doris Hohensee, a Nashua resident who homeschooled her six children and was active in the legislative battles. “Now they’ve got government money and it’s completely lax.”

Homeschoolers who use the EFA money have many of the same concerns about government intrusion, but most see the percieved threat level as overblown.

“What actually is happening is not what they’re saying could happen,” MacQuarrie said.

A group of unknown size

In part because of the lack of government oversight, no public record exists of how many students are homeschooled in New Hampshire.

Families who participate in the third pathway – which is called, simply, home education – are required by law to notify their school or the Department of Education when they start and end homeschooling.

The termination requirement is followed only sparingly though, according to Tim Carney, an administrator at the Department of Education. Carney said he had only come across about 20 termination notifications during his entire tenure, according to minutes from a meeting of home education groups last year.

In all, Carney speculated last year that the state has as many as 38,000 unfunded homeschoolers, according to minutes from the meeting, though he did not respond to a request for comment on how he arrived at that figure. In the last 10 years, parents have submitted a total of 39,047 notifications across all grades that they are commencing an unfunded homeschooling program, though many of those students have since aged out.

If the current number of unfunded homeschooling students truly approached either of those two figures, the total would be nearly a quarter the size of the state’s entire public school enrollment last year and more than double its private school enrollment.

Those numbers don’t include the students who homeschool through the EFA program, who, like the unfunded homeschooolers, the state does not track. Kate Baker Demers, the director of the company contracted to run the EFA program, said the “closest proxy” to estimate that figure would use the percentage of money in the program that does not go to private schoools.

In 2022-23, the most recent year for which data is available, 38% of all EFA dollars went to sources other than private schools. That year, a total of 3,025 students participated in the program, so the estimate would suggest about 1,150 homeschooling students received EFAs.

A scarlet letter?

When Elizabeth Beyer moved from Kansas to New Hampshire two years ago, she began to hear about the EFA program in whispers.

As she got her children involved in various activities with other homeschooling families, people would tell her, “We’re able to do this or that because of our EFA funds, but please don’t share that.”

“EFA families don’t feel like they can be super vocal in the greater homeschool community because they fear being ostracized,” said Beyer, who declined to say whether her family uses the program itself. “They fear being labeled with their scarlet letter in a homeschool community that has become increasingly hostile towards them.”

A second-generation homeschooling parent, Beyer was used to the unconditional support and warmth of the community. The culture of fear felt foreign and troubling.

Like MacQuarrie before her, Beyer turned to the community’s Facebook groups to try to understand what was going on.

While different groups varied in their orientation to the program, the approach of the GSHE group – considered the most active and influential in the community, according to most people – jumped out.

The group had “a lot of rhetoric around ‘EFA people aren’t real homeschoolers. EFA is threatening our freedoms. If you participate in EFA, you’re putting a giant target on all homeschoolers back,’” according to Beyer.

Most troubling to Beyer, however, was that the moderators of the Facebook group appeared to be kicking out those who discussed the program.

Last month, Beyer took her concerns to Granite Grok, the political website where much of the open dialogue about the EFA program within the homeschooling community has played out.

In a piece called “A House Divided – When Homeschoolers Turn on Each Other,” Beyer argued that anti-EFA sentiment within the community was harmful.

“When homeschool mothers are not allowed to ask genuine questions in places like the Granite State Home Educators Facebook group without being censored and banned, it is pretty clear that there is no interest in supporting the mothers,” Beyer wrote. “Instead, there is a clear goal of polarizing people on this topic and creating an intolerance for alternative decisions.”

Hours after the story was published, Beyer received a Facebook message from Weeden informing her that she had been removed from the group for what Weeden characterized as an “attack” on it.

To Beyer, that decision proved the point of her piece.

“Anytime any group of people wants exclusive rights to the narrative, I’m just like, this is not good,” she said.

Weeden said that take evinces a fundamental misunderstanding of the Facebook group.

“I just want to make clear that we do not scarlet people. That is just not who we are and what we do,” she said. “If people can follow the rules of the group – which are super duper clear – then they are welcome.”

She and Levell, the director of GSHE, said they have weathered personal attacks and only remove people when they use inappropriate language or criticize the group.

“If people are going to cause problems and call me un-Christian and divisive then yeah they don’t have access to my hard work,” Weeden said.

At the council

Not all unfunded homeschoolers are as militant about the EFA program as the Granite State Home Educators and some are outwardly supportive.

Late last year, at a meeting of the Home Education Advisory Council – a group created by the state to represent the interests of the unfunded homeschoolers – things grew testy when the members set out to elect a new chair.

Representatives from GSHE and a peer group, Christian Home Educators of New Hampshire and Southern Maine, demanded that each member of the council who was eligible to serve as chair disclose whether they exclusively represent the interests of unfunded homeschooling families or whether they cater to EFA homeschoolers, too.

“Is the sense that any of these organizations are working on both sides of the divide?” asked Marcus Zuech, the representative from GSHE.

Althea Barton, the representative for a group called the New Hampshire Homeschooling Coalition, replied that was a difficult question to answer. Her group, she said, didn’t advocate for anyone, though it does support families who are changing from one pathway to another.

Minutes later, Michelle Rohrbacher, the representative for Christian Home Educators of New Hampshire and Southern Maine, received a note from Weeden, who was seated in the audience.

“Althea’s newsletter and website say that they support EFA families so that would disqualify her in that sense” from serving as chair, Rohrbacher said, after reviewing the note.

“I would like individual disclosure,” Rohrbacher said. “That would be the cleanest and simplest if people could just be honest.”

For roughly 30 minutes, the debate about who was eligible to serve as chair carried on, until Rohrbacher nominated Zuech, the GSHE representative. In the end, he was unanimously elected.

Healing

In late 2023, MacQuarrie and her two children finally moved back to Manchester, and a few months later, she enrolled the family in the EFA program for the first time.

“For a long time, EFA was made to be the enemy and I didn’t – because of my circumstances – I didn’t have the emotional energy to research it any further,” she said.

MacQuarrie said she wishes more empathy had existed over the last three years for families like hers.

“A lot of [the unfunded homeschooling families] are single-income households, but there’s a difference between a single-income household that is able to meet all of their needs – truly all of their needs – and a family like mine that has to budget for socks,” she said. “…I don’t have the privilege or the freedom to not take whatever assistance is available to me.”

In the last few months, however, MacQuarrie said she’s noticed a positive shift within the state’s homeschooling community.

“People are now searching for the community that we’ve lost – that tight-knit community that we’ve lost,” MacQuarrie said. “I do feel like there’s some healing that is taking place.”

However, due to the expense of sending her daughter to her micro-school every day, MacQuarrie is considering a public charter school for the first time as a parent.

“She would no longer be a homeschooler,” MacQuarrie said, “which I can’t tell you how wild that idea is.”

Still, MacQuarrie said that won’t change the centrality of homeschooling in their lives.

“Even if both kids go into the full-blown Manchester School District – not charter – no matter what, we will always be part of the community because they grew up in this world,” MacQuarrie said. “That’s not going to change.”

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