This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
Hours after the release of private messages purportedly showing the Republican chair of a House education committee advocating for “segregated schools,” the lawmaker publicly said she supported separating schools by political party.
“Republicans have been self-segregating out of the leftist indoctrination centers for decades,” wrote Rep. Kristin Noble, the chair of the House Education Policy and Administration committee, apparently referring to public schools.
“If democrats had their own schools, and we had our own, families wouldn’t need to avail themselves of the wildly successful education freedom account program,” she added. “It’s a win / win proposition.”
Noble’s statement, released Wednesday, followed a report by the left-wing news site Granite Post exposing a pair of messages sent by a user labeled as “Kristin Noble,” who wrote: “when we have segregated schools we can add all the fun stuff lol.”
The user then added: “imagine the scores though if we had schools for them and some for us.”
The chat, called “EdPolicy2026,” appeared to contain at least some of the Republican members of the committee that Noble, a Bedford representative, chairs.
A user labeled as “Katy Peternel,” who is the vice chair of the committee, responded with a laughing emoji to the first message. Other members of the chat did not appear to acknowledge the comments.
Asked by the Concord Monitor before the release of her public statement whether she had indeed written the messages attributed to her, Noble declined to answer but said she was “sure there is” more context behind them.
The term “segregated schools” typically refers to racial segregation. Noble claimed in her statement that she was referring to political segregation.
Even so, the lawmaker’s public statement is a stunningly candid articulation of a Republican leader’s educational objectives. The party has increasingly favored policies that advance private education options, establishing the education freedom account program in 2021 and dramatically expanding it last year.
At the same time, Republican lawmakers have balked at increasing state funding for public education, despite the state Supreme Court ordering the legislature to do so.
Enrollment in New Hampshire private schools has increased 6% over the last five years while enrollment in public schools has dropped 4% during the same period.
The largest enrollment fluctuation has taken place at the state’s independent Christian schools, which have collectively seen a 30% increase in students since the education freedom account program launched, a Monitor analysis conducted last year found. These institutions typically require students and their families to adhere to strict conservative values, including barring those who identify as LGBTQ+.
“I think that religious schools are probably seen as a wall – as a bastion – against some of these current issues that tend to be very divisive,” Michael Kingsley, the leader of Trinity Christian School in Concord, previously told the Monitor. “And so the families that are saying, ‘We want our students in a conservative place where they’re going to be taught traditional values,’ see a religious school as being that.”
Kingsley’s school was the third-largest recipient of education freedom account dollars last school year. In all, nearly 90% of the money spent by families on tuition through the program went to religiously-affiliated schools, the Monitor found.
The state releases no data on the racial demographics of its private schools, but political and racial segregation have historically been linked.
Three of the top four largest private school beneficiaries of the education freedom account program — Trinity High School in Manchester, Trinity Christian in Concord and Concord Christian Academy — have a far higher percentage of white students than the public school districts in their cities, according to a ProPublica database, which relies on the schools’ completion of voluntary surveys.
The contrast is especially pronounced at Trinity High School in Manchester, where 86% of students are white compared with 52% in the local public school district.
In total, private schools in New Hampshire are actually slightly less white than the state’s public schools, according to ProPublica, though this appears to be largely driven by the diversity of the state’s large prep schools. The data ProPublica relied upon is from the 2021-22 school year.
The comments attributed to Noble drew swift condemnation from leading Democrats.
“Segregation is not a relic to be mocked; it is a living scar carved into our schools, our communities and our democracy,” House Democratic leader Alexis Simpson wrote in a statement. “It was built through violence, enforced by law and justified by indifference.”
Rep. Dave Luneau, a Hopkinton Democrat and the ranking member of Noble’s committee, called the comments “disgusting.”
“They represent where education was in the country more than a hundred years ago,” he said in a brief interview.
In her statement, Noble wrote that “it’s funny to watch the Democrats feign outrage when I thought they’d be supportive of managing their own schools, with libraries full of porn, biological males in girls sports and bathrooms and as much DEI curriculum as their hearts desire.”
“Schools like that will have terrible test scores because they focus on social justice rather than academics,” she added.
The state does not collect data on the test scores of students in private schools.
Noble is in her second term as a state representative. She became chair of the Education Policy and Administration committee just months ago, when Rep. Glenn Cordelli abruptly resigned due to a move out of state.
Noble has sponsored bills this legislative session that would prohibit public schools from teaching “critical race theory or LGBTQ+ ideologies, allow the department of education to withhold funding from public schools under certain circumstances and remove the enrollment cap for the education freedom account program.
Only one of Noble’s Republican colleagues on her committee responded when asked about their chair’s messages and public statement.
Rep. Mike Belcher of Wakefield wrote in an email that he interpreted Noble’s initial message as “an off-hand quip meant to be humorous.”
He said that he didn’t think ideologically segregated schools were “realistic or on the table at the moment.”
However, he wrote, “I do think that government run schools are in a de facto sense ‘Democrat’ schools, and many Republicans and others have availed themselves of the successful EFA program because they don’t desire that sort of education for their children.”