Latest news with #NewHampshireFiscalPolicyInstitute
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
NHFPI report details potential impact of $81.3 million being revoked from New Hampshire DHHS
The funding came from myriad federal laws, grants, and programs designed to help New Hampshire, and other states, recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. (Getty Images) In March, the federal government announced it was revoking $81.3 million in pandemic-related funding from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services that was not expected to expire until 2026. The funding was being used to support the state's epidemiological laboratory and testing capacity, outreach to vaccinate residents, efforts to address health disparities in the state, and substance use disorder treatment programming, as outlined in a new report from the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. The funding came from myriad federal laws, grants, and programs designed to help New Hampshire, and other states, recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. State officials originally believed they'd be able to spend this funding into 2026, but in a surprise announcement, federal officials clawed back the funding on grounds that the pandemic has ended. This made a difficult budget year for New Hampshire ever more challenging. The state has been dealing with lagging business tax revenues for the past few years, is being compelled by the courts to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement money after hundreds of children were abused in its juvenile detention centers, and was already running out of pandemic-era federal funding. Amid these challenges, Gov. Kelly Ayotte unveiled a $16 billion two-year budget proposal in February. House lawmakers decided her cuts weren't sufficient to deal with the aforementioned fiscal challenges and passed a budget in April that spends $643 million less than the governor's proposal. Now, the Senate is debating the spending plan, and lawmakers will have to figure out how to either find funding for these programs elsewhere or eliminate them. Roughly two-thirds — $51.1 million — of the revoked funding was set aside for the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases Program, a joint program between the federal government and states that seeks to allow states to respond to disease outbreaks, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. The money was being spent to increase the capacity of the state's epidemiological testing and laboratories, and on disease research and surveillance. About a quarter of the funding — $20.7 million — the federal government revoked was being used to support vaccine outreach efforts. Additionally, about 6% — $5 million — was being used to address health disparities in how COVID-19 affected different populations. Money from both of those segments was used to hire 39 community health workers. Those community health workers, typically members of the community where they serve, helped clients navigate the complicated health care system and connected them to food assistance or child care programs. Additionally, the revoked money was funding behavioral health programs. A little over 2% — $2.1 million — came from a grant meant to provide community mental health services, and almost 3% — $2.3 million — was being used to support substance use (addiction) treatment, though the money was mostly being used on operational support and not direct patient services. That included programs teaching first responders how to deal with patients experiencing PTSD or other trauma, assisting community mental health centers in becoming federally certified as community behavioral health clinics, and the state's 24-hour service that provides mental health assistance via phone and in-person to people experiencing crises. Those interested in reading more can find the Fiscal Policy Institute's report online at
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New Hampshire is facing many child care challenges. Red tape doesn't have to be one of them.
"Our state lawmakers have the power to remove unnecessary barriers Child Care Scholarship participants have experienced. " (Photo by) Child care in New Hampshire has become increasingly unaffordable for working families, creating a challenge that affects not only parents and children but our entire state economy. While the New Hampshire Child Care Scholarship Program exists to help families afford quality care, administrative red tape has caused this vital resource to be underutilized. Recent reports from both the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy and the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute confirm what many families already know: our Child Care Scholarship system is hampered by 'substantial paperwork and complicated application processes' that limit its reach and effectiveness. In a series of focus groups, participants applying for the Child Care Scholarship said they found the process 'particularly complicated,' and reported experiencing 'substantial stress' and investing 'significant time' in applying. As one parent described the process, 'You literally have to have all your ducks in a row for you to even apply.' This parent explained, 'You have to have the day care that they're going to, the hours that they're going to be, and then you have to have that all set up with your work.' Even with all those pieces in place, the parent described a frustrating 'runaround' in the application process. 'There's been a few times when I'm, like, OK, what do you need? Do you need blood at this point? Because it's just like I've given you everything at this point.' And while going through this process, the parent explained, 'You see those [child care] balances adding up and if you miss one thing and they deny [your application], then you have to redo it all over again hoping that [the child care provider won't say] you need to pay this until they can reimburse us.' Our state lawmakers have the power to remove unnecessary barriers Child Care Scholarship participants have experienced. Senate Bill 243, for example, would create a pilot program for 'presumptive eligibility,' allowing families who meet basic screening criteria to receive up to 60 days of scholarship funding while their full application is processed. This addresses a critical gap during which families could have to delay the start of a job while waiting for scholarship approval. Parents should not have to turn down employment opportunities because they can't afford child care while their paperwork is being processed. The bill would also require a study of the application process itself. In recent listening sessions across the state, New Futures learned that families applying for Child Care Scholarship funding face time-consuming requests for information and documentation, often beyond what's needed to determine eligibility for the scholarship program. Blended or foster families, parents with disabilities that exempt them from the program's work requirements, families with limited technology, and families with a primary language other than English can face additional hurdles in the application process. This study will ensure eligible families aren't unreasonably discouraged from participating in the program. And, the bill aligns scholarship processes with the realities of modern child care businesses. Currently, providers waste valuable time reporting detailed attendance data despite the fact that payments are now based on enrollment, not attendance. The legislation would streamline these processes and also create a system of up-front payments for child care providers — just as they receive from non-scholarship families — offering greater economic stability and encouraging more providers to accept scholarship families. Such updates to the Child Care Scholarship program would address problems that are preventing an existing program from reaching its full potential. The benefits of these improvements would extend far beyond administrative convenience. When more families can access the scholarship program, more children receive quality care linked to positive developmental outcomes, child care businesses receive much-needed support, and parents can participate more fully in our state's workforce. And importantly, the federal government more than matches every state dollar spent on the program. At a time when child care costs are crushing family budgets and limiting our workforce, we can't afford to let administrative barriers restrict access to this important program. Cora Hoppe, the executive director of the Rochester Child Care Center, has noted that when families secure a scholarship: 'The sense of relief is huge. I don't see parents coming in panicked about paying their bill or afraid to see me. [Parents] can build better relationships with the teachers and administration because they're not worried about [paying their bill].' The New Hampshire Legislature has an opportunity to make our Child Care Scholarship program work as intended — supporting children, families, providers, and our economy.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The high costs of underinvestment in early childhood care and education
"As New Hampshire families, businesses, and the state economy all have vested interests in the economic impacts of ECE, funding could be shared across these beneficiaries." (Getty Images) New Hampshire faces a significant child care shortage, with economic impacts extending beyond families with young children. According to a recent New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute analysis that I conducted, each of the approximately 9,000 unavailable Granite State child care slots in 2023 may have cost the state's economy between $22,416 and $35,004 in lost earnings to families, and reduced revenues among New Hampshire's state and local governments as well as businesses. Families may have lost as much as $177.9 million in wages in 2023 due to inadequate child care availability. While lost wages directly affect family budgets, they also impact local communities that would otherwise benefit from income spent at area businesses. New Hampshire businesses may have collectively lost as much as $55.5 million in 2023 due to reduced productivity and impacts from benefits paid when employees were not working. Business losses also include potential costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and training replacements when employees resign due to inadequate child care. Tax revenues are adversely affected when families and businesses experience financial losses. Residents pay taxes related to property, travel, leisure, dining out, and certain other sales. Granite Staters have an average tax rate of about 6.6% while effective business tax rates are approximately 4.4%. Using these estimates, New Hampshire's state and local governments may have lost the equivalent of approximately $1,300 to $2,000 per unavailable child care slot. The governor's state fiscal years 2026-2027 budget proposal allocates about $84.9 million across both years to New Hampshire's Bureau of Child Development and Head Start Collaboration. This bureau administers the main funding mechanism for the New Hampshire Child Care Scholarship Program (NHCCSP), a state-federal partnership that provides child care assistance to families with low and moderate incomes. This allocation makes up about half of one percent of the governor's proposed $16.01 billion state budget. Addressing the ECE shortage is challenging due to limited resources. Private tuition is the primary way ECE providers raise revenue; however, they are limited in how much they can increase tuition rates before families can no longer afford child care. Many providers operate on thin, if any, profit margins, so there are few funds to reinvest into their businesses. Public support can help providers keep spots available for children and make investments for future expansions. State general funds could provide flexible support as these funds can be spent in any way the Legislature deems appropriate. The state distributed $15 million in General Funds to ECE providers under the current state budget to support the recruitment and retention of child care educators. This funding is not repeated in the governor's budget proposal. In 2024, New Hampshire passed legislation to allocate $2 million for a six-month program that provides child care assistance to certain ECE professionals who work at least 25 hours per week in licensed child care facilities. To be eligible, these professionals must work in facilities that accept NHCCSP and live in households that earn no more than 100 percent of the state median income, or $133,449 for a family of four. Thoughtful data collection can help determine the effectiveness of these programs for future consideration. Business partnerships may be an alternative to increased tuition costs for families. Child care development grant programs may be an opportunity for businesses to continually invest in a funding pool accessible to providers. Funds could be used for various expenses, including increasing teacher wages, hiring additional educators, and building or purchasing larger spaces to expand capacity. Federal funding is another source of ECE support but comes with specific rules regulating how the funding can be spent. To access certain federal resources for ECE, New Hampshire must provide 50:50 fund matching based on the Federal Medicaid Assistance Percentage (FMAP). At least 70% of funding must be utilized for NHCCSP. The remaining funding must be divided between support to help ensure New Hampshire children have high-quality ECE, administrative expenses, and other nondirect services including IT systems costs. As New Hampshire families, businesses, and the state economy all have vested interests in the economic impacts of ECE, funding could be shared across these beneficiaries. While more public funding would likely be required, investments to address the ECE shortage have positive returns for all Granite Staters. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, even among New Hampshire counties and municipalities, and thus, multifaceted approaches will need to be implemented while ensuring safe, enriching environments for the Granite State's youngest residents.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
In New Hampshire, the public education fight offers a clear view of the state of the union
New Hampshire has the fourth highest effective property tax rate in the country. (Getty Images) One of the best ways to understand what Republican politicians are trying to sell — or inflict upon — the American people is to look at the fight over public education. In New Hampshire, 61% of public school funding comes from property taxes raised locally, and another 9% comes from the Statewide Education Property Tax (SWEPT). And, as noted by the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute in a January fact sheet, 'New Hampshire spent the least amount of state funds on its public K-12 schools (as a percentage of the total revenue) of any state in the country.' New Hampshire also ranks dead last in state funding for higher public education, which translates to in-state tuition being much less affordable here than it could and should be. Meanwhile, the Granite State has the fourth highest effective property tax rate in the country, and this year's town meeting season suggests a lot of local property-tax payers have had enough. Their anger is justifiable — but it's often misdirected. Blaming school districts for high property taxes is like blaming a doctor for the cost of health care. It's the system that's broken, not the people working within it. That is what makes New Hampshire's voucher program — dubbed education freedom accounts – so utterly misguided and so positively destructive. As originally pitched, the purpose of New Hampshire's EFA program was to give lower-income families an opportunity to use public money to pay for an alternative to their community public school, including for home schooling or private school expenses. It was a bad idea at inception, mind you, but it was at least defensible as a publicly funded voucher created solely for the benefit of lower-income Granite Staters. After all, those lower-income residents are much more likely to be living in a property-poor community with underperforming schools. Now, to nobody's surprise, Republicans in the State House are working to make the voucher program universal, which strips the EFA program of its only marginally credible 'public good' argument: that it is meant to help those with the least. But 'school choice' has always been a lie propagated by a myth. The truth is that New Hampshire's system of funding public education is a wreck by design — for communities, taxpayers, and most of all children — and the voucher program is a bag of rocks painted to look like a lifeboat. Privatizing our public schools is the ultimate goal of school vouchers, and if you think for a second that corporate greed isn't going to make matters infinitely worse for those with the least then you should read up on Big Pharma, Big Oil, and American tech and health care giants. History and modernity suggest America's 'Big Education' era is probably not going to be awesome for America's middle and lower classes. But if we're going to debate the merits of vouchers, whether income-capped or not, we should at the very least begin with the understanding that New Hampshire public schools are not monolithic. To say that public schools are failing 'in general' is a complete misreading of the situation. New Hampshire public schools in wealthier communities are doing just fine, with places such as Hanover, Windham, and Bedford boasting some of the top-ranked high schools in the state (and top 10% in the nation), according to U.S. News and World Report. Each of those three communities has a median household income of more than $160,000. At the bottom of the school rankings are communities such as Claremont, Littleton, and Pittsburg, each with a median household income of less than $55,000. That data tells us public schools are not failing in New Hampshire but that New Hampshire is failing its public schools. The state's system of education funding creates ZIP code winners and ZIP code losers, and then the residents of those losing towns are directed to blame their own school districts — their own neighbors — for the too-high price of not-good-enough results. Rather than addressing a system that was designed to ensure poorer communities have poorer schools, Republicans instead offer us vouchers. It's a destructive 'solution' to a problem they themselves created and exacerbated through stubborn, near-religious obedience to bad tax policies. Classic GOP, classic New Hampshire. For whom does our vaunted tax advantage exist if not for struggling New Hampshire families in struggling New Hampshire towns and cities? The answer is just as clear here in New Hampshire as it is in Washington. The many must pay so the few can prosper, and so it goes.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Nearly 1 in 3 experiencing poverty in New Hampshire are disabled, NHFPI study finds
(New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute screenshot) People with disabilities make up nearly a third of New Hampshire's impoverished, according to a new study from the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. The study, by researcher Jessica Williams, also examined other demographic groups more affected by poverty. In total, around 7.2% of people in New Hampshire were impoverished in 2023, according to the study. That's 98,000 people — more than the populations of Claremont, Concord, Laconia, and Portsmouth combined. Almost 20,000 of those were children. Among people identifying as Hispanic and Latino in the state, the poverty rate is nearly double: 13.8%, or about 8,250, the study found, using a five-year average ending 2023. Black people had a poverty rate of 11.2 percent (2,170 people) while Asian and non-Hispanic white people had rates of 6.1% (2,110) and 6.7% (79,780), respectively. People identifying as two or more races had a poverty rate of 10% (7,400 people). White people, because they're the majority, comprised 82.7% of New Hampshire's impoverished. Families with more children, who likely have more expenses and higher poverty thresholds, were more likely to be living in poverty. Based on five-year averages ending in 2023, New Hampshire families without any related children experienced a poverty rate of about 2.6%, according to the study. Those with one or two children experienced almost double that: 6.5%. Meanwhile, families with three or four related children had a poverty rate of 9.7 percent, almost four times the rate of families with no related children. Families with single mothers were 18 times more likely to experience poverty than families with married parents. More than 1 in 4 such families experienced poverty, while about 13% of single-father families experienced poverty, according to the study. Coos and Sullivan counties, rural parts of New Hampshire, experienced the highest poverty rates from 2019 to 2023 in the state: 12.9% and 10.8%, respectively, per the study. Hillsborough and Rockingham counties had the largest total number of impoverished people due to their larger population sizes, but they experienced the state's lowest poverty rates during that five-year period, at 6.9% and 4.8%, respectively. The study used the federal government's Official Poverty Measure as the threshold to define poverty. For the contiguous U.S., that was $15,852 for a single person under 65 years old, $24,526 for a family of three with one child, and $30,900 for a family of four with two children in 2023. Those interested in reading more, can visit online.
