HB 748 would create a local voucher program that could easily decimate our local neighborhood public schools, leaving students with a threadbare education. It also could rapidly increase already burdensome property taxes in any New Hampshire school district that adopts it. It would do this because it would require local districts to fund local voucher accounts for any eligible student who lives in their district at twice the state per pupil adequacy grant plus any differential aid, a sum of $8,364 to $13,668 per student.

Busy Week Ahead

Priority Education Bills Front and Center

It was a mostly quiet week in Concord as many legislative committees were on February break, just like our public schools. One big development this week was that anti- public education politicians, very angry that voters in most school districts steadfastly support their public schools and refuse to set artificial and harmful spending caps, brought forward an amendment that would mandate, through state law, a budget cap on local school budgets. School districts already have spending controls—they are called voters, who must choose to approve or vote down every budget and change in local property taxes. It is not up to the extremist majority in Concord to impose a decision on local voters to automatically limit local spending.  It would do well for the current anti-public education politicians in Concord to recognize they should work to meet their constitutional obligation to all Granite State students to fund robust public education in all school districts instead of passing the property tax burden onto Granite Staters at the local level. You can read more about the amendment here. It will be discussed in committee on Tuesday.

Victories for Public Sector Unions and Public Education

BIG VICTORY! The House Labor Committee this week voted to defeat HB 735—the bill that would require public sector unions to vote to recertify. As we have said before, we are not worried about us—we were worried about time and energy this would have taken and how it would have affected our ability to represent you. This was an attack on unions and collective bargaining plain and simple. Your voices matter and you were heard. The next step will be a full vote by the House during the first week in March.

Open Enrollment Could Be Closed to Many

It sounds like such a simple who-could-oppose-this bill: Let New Hampshire students attend any public school in the state. But it’s not so simple, and open enrollment would mean “closed to you” for many Granite State families due to geography and work schedules.

If the idea is to provide the opportunity for a high-quality public education for all, this legislation is the wrong approach.

I am here today to testify in opposition to HB 10 establishing the parental bill of rights.

While this bill gathers together existing statutory parental rights in one place, it also appears to expand on them with some sweeping assertions and vague language. This bill sets up potential conflicts between parents and teachers or other school staff when a parent asserts their unlimited right to direct the education of his child while in a public school and the teacher is teaching the school board approved  curriculum to meet the state approved standards. We know that students do best in school when parents and teachers work together as a team, focusing on the best interest of the child.

Now is a time when we should be focusing on real solutions to make sure our Granite State students can learn and thrive in our public schools. We should be focused on making sure they all feel they are welcome and connected to their school community. In particular, this Legislature should be focusing on ensuring that each neighborhood public school has enough resources to provide every student with individual teacher attention, learning and behavior support from trained paraprofessionals, school counselors and nurses, and a wide variety of quality learning resources and all the other components of a robust public education. Instead, we get a bill that will divide communities, pitting different families against each other, and will make it easier to remove books from school libraries and micromanage the materials available in the classroom. All of this makes it harder to meet students’ learning needs and help them succeed.