CONCORD — Durham Democrat Timothy Horrigan told members of the House Education Committee that House Bill 1592 simply reflects the state constitution’s ban on sending tax money to religious institutions, but others who testified said parents should be able to send their children to religious schools if their public schools are not performing well.
Committee members hearing the testimony on March 4 also seemed to question the validity of the bill, which would amend RSA 194-F:2 to restrict Education Freedom Account grants to accredited educational institutions and would ban their use at “a religious school or for a religious education or training”.
Information provided by the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which administers the program, indicates that about 70 current education “vendors” would be affected by the bill. During the 2022-2023 school year, religious-based vendors received about $5.3 million in EFA payments.
Article 6 of the New Hampshire Constitution states, “no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination” — a straightforward ban, according to Horrigan.
Representative Glenn Cordelli (R-Tuftonboro) cited a number of court decisions that he believes supersede that ban, and he argued that the reason for putting it into the state constitution was to end the practice of sending public money exclusively to the Congregational Church.
“This was added to the constitution so you couldn’t compel someone to pay money to the Congregational Church,” Cordelli said, “but in 1791, there was a law that passed that allowed towns to do this. That was eventually repealed in 1819, as other faiths started objecting to collecting money for the Congregational churches. They felt, you know, they should have equal dibs on [those] taxpayer dollars, I guess.”
“I might respectfully disagree with that history,” Horrigan responded. “I’ve probably been in the legislature since 2008, so a lot of those events happened before my service …. The separation of church and state didn’t really exist in the 1700s, and it kind of evolved.”
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