Watch out for out-of-state lobbyists spewing misinformation about our NH public schools. Andrew Yates, who works for a Virginia company that promotes school vouchers, tells us in a My Turn (Monitor, 4/17) that school vouchers will save us taxpayer money. Not true! School vouchers will not only not save us money in the future, they have actually cost us millions of dollars in the past three years.

Here’s the math: 81% of NH students who have used vouchers to date were actually being privately schooled before their parents applied for vouchers to educate them at-home or in religious and other kinds of private settings. At an average voucher cost of $5,255, that’s $17.9M of NH taxpayer money that the state doled out to parents whose children were already being privately schooled and not costing taxpayers a dime. Another way that vouchers don’t save money: The relatively few children actually taking vouchers as they leave public schools (56 in Concord took vouchers this year) generally don’t add up to enough in any one school or classroom to affect big school expenses like numbers of teachers and building maintenance.

Mr. Yates recommends adding 20,000 more students to NH voucher rolls. If percentages hold true, and a lot of them are already in private school, that would add up to big time new expense. Counsel your reps and senators to vote down expansions of our school voucher program.

Patricia Bass

Concord