Jennifer Belmont-Earl is a mother with two children in public schools. She lives in Barrington.

My boys have golden hair that curls around their faces. One has freckles with green eyes, the other the biggest blue eyes you have ever seen.

They don’t sit still easily, expressing their effervescent happiness with movement. My oldest dances, beaming every time he takes the stage. He tells new mothers they have the cutest babies. He won our town gingerbread competition, and he smiles and hugs his teacher every morning. His ambition is to become a father like his daddy, a preschool teacher and a YouTuber.

My youngest is a speed demon who just learned to paint. He loves Tom Petty and expresses love by covering me with kisses and giggling. He holds his one-on-one’s hand, dragging her into his classroom. He is learning to point to pictures to communicate with his classmates. His teachers explain to his friends that, when he reaches out to touch them, he is saying hello and asking to play.

My children’s presence in their public school is an asset. It is essential that they have the support they need to access an adequate education.

Disability is stigmatized in our society. Often, when I am in line with my children — which is extremely hard for my youngest — kids will react with curiosity when he starts yelling. Their parents will shush them and look away. When my oldest went to playgrounds and tried to communicate by touch, the other child often screamed, and their parents would move in to protect their abled children from my one-year-old.

I can bear this because I know my children are integrated in their public schools. Their teachers help them make friends and encourage other students to understand neurodiverse communication. Not every child with a disability has such a supportive public school, but the solution is not to remove our children from general education classrooms. It is not taking our children from public spaces and using state monies to put them into private schools.

Private schools do not have to provide an adequate education to children experiencing disability or follow Individualized Education Programs (IEP). They are not held to the same standards as public schools and can remove learners from their institution without reimbursement. These private schools keep the money from Education Freedom Accounts, and the families of excluded children have to begin the IEP process all over again with a public school that now has less money to support their child.

My school district already has a problem with funding because far more parents use EFAs than in surrounding districts. Removing the income limits imposed on EFAs will only exacerbate the financial difficulties faced by individual school districts by allowing wealthy parents to take money that could have been used by public schools and putting it in their own pockets in the form of tuition reduction.

Private schools built specifically for children with disabilities separate those students from the rest of their community. My community deserves to know my beautiful children, and my children are legally entitled to an adequate public education. The push to segregate children with disabilities is evidenced by the unusual amount of legislation this year and the funding cuts for the things children need to succeed in school and communities. My children are being hurt by this. The effort to push children like mine out of public spaces is shameful.

When New Hampshire politicians suggest families can meet the needs of their children with disabilities by sending them to private schools through Education Freedom Accounts, they are really saying that our children experiencing disabilities do not need to be protected by IEPs, that they are not entitled to an adequate education in their own communities and that abled kids do not deserve the chance to learn alongside children with disabilities.

More ominously, they are providing the escape for parents who do not want their children in school with kids like mine, who view them as a drain on our resources and a distraction in the classroom. EFAs can be used to help fund a private education for abled children in places that would exclude my children. While a parent can choose where to send their own child to school, it is immoral to use public monies to provide children with a private, segregated education.

Please do not expand the EFA income cap. Please recognize that my children are people too.