“Public schools are critical”: Governor Ayotte applauds public schools and teachers, while vowing to expand school voucher program

January 9th, 2025

On Thursday, January 9, Governor Kelly Ayotte (R-Nashua) applauded public schools in her inaugural address, saying that “public schools are critical.” She vowed to ban cell phones in schools, maintain high standards for students, and invest in the trades and career education. She also said that she’d honor teachers.

“Teachers know uniquely what is working for our students and what isn’t. We need to listen to them,” she said. 

She also expressed support for expanding the state’s school voucher program, known as Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs), while later underscoring the state’s troubling economic outlook. According to Reaching Higher NH’s most recent analysis, expanding the school voucher program could cost the state more than $100 million every year. 

The effort, House Bill 115, has a public hearing on Thursday, January 16. 

The move to grow the school voucher program is happening while state budget writers grapple with significantly lower state revenues due largely to repeated business tax cuts and lower projected tax estimates. According to reports, the Education Trust Fund, which funds public schools, charter schools, and the state’s school voucher program, has $53.8 million less than anticipated so far this fiscal year.

Governor Ayotte on education:

“While being Governor is a big job, I can tell you the biggest job I’ve faced in my life is that of being a parent. As a parent, our life’s work is our children. We pour into them in so many ways when they are under our roof and when they go out on their own, our minds are never far from them.

As public servants, we must bring that spirit and that focus to our education system.

We are in the top ten in total education funding per pupil in the country – I think that’s wonderful, and we need to keep it up. But it’s not only about dollars and cents, it’s also about how best our children learn and what kind of environment we are creating in our classrooms.

As a mother, I understand that every child learns differently and that we should give each child the opportunity to be in the education setting that allows them to reach his or her full potential.

Public Schools are critical, and I am the proud product of Nashua’s public schools, but they are not working for every child. I applaud the work the legislature has done to expand opportunities for families through education freedom accounts and look forward to strengthening and expanding this program to ensure more families have the freedom to put their children in the learning environment that is best for them.

Joe and I talk about what he is seeing in the classroom and what his students need all the time. He and the thousands of teachers across our state are on the front lines of our education system. Teachers know uniquely what is working for our students and what isn’t. We need to listen to them.

That’s why today I am announcing that we will be taking action to ban cell phones in our schools.

Screens are negatively impacting our learning environments, drawing students’ attention away from their classes, and becoming a barrier for teachers to do their jobs. No more.

We also need to have some hard conversations about how prepared our students are when they leave high school to join the workforce or continue their studies.

We have done struggling students a disservice by passing them along when they don’t grasp the material at hand. This problem only snowballs the longer it goes on. We can’t allow our standards to slide because the student is the one who pays the price for our unwillingness to have tough conversations about whether they are truly prepared for the next step.

We need to keep emphasizing the importance of investments in the trades, career-ready education and workforce training. Our businesses are desperately in need of workers. We’ve got a generation retiring, and we do not have enough young people considering these critical jobs.

We need to keep telling the amazing stories of the opportunities that exist in the trades and open more pathways to a good-paying career.

We need to expand public-private partnerships and continue the great work that is already happening to increase workforce training programs and help our community colleges expand the pipeline.”

Read the full transcript of Governor Ayotte’s inaugural address here, and watch it on YouTube here.