May 10, 2018 - Bow, NH

Today marked the end of the long 2017-18 saga of SB 193, the proposal to establish Education Savings Accounts as a means of funneling public education money to those choosing to attend private schools or home-schooling.  After eighteen months and innumerable twists and turns, the end came quickly in the NH House.  Having consigned SB 193 to interim study by the Finance Committee for the remainder of the 2018 session, the House now faced the early Senate version of SB 193, attached as an amendment to another House bill on an unrelated subject. 

Very quickly, the bill containing the Senate’s early version of SB 193 came before the House this morning.  By an extremely narrow margin, 170-165, the House rejected the Republican majority motion to join with the Senate in a Committee of Conference to try to salvage something from the saga of SB 193.  Immediately after, the House then voted 180-163 to “non concur” with the Senate on the amended bill (HB 1636) effectively killing it and its amendment (the original SB 193) for the session.  And so it has ended.  SB 193 will be studied by Finance this summer in an attempt to somehow come up with a version that shovels public funds to private schools but which somehow does not add costs the State or local property taxpayers.  It will be a difficult task.  In the meantime, the issue is dead, at least until 2019.

Action Needed

May 7, 2018 - Bow, NH

If you have seen the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you must recall the early scene in the squalid, plague-stricken village.  As the cartman walks through calling on villagers to “Bring out your dead,” we see an elderly and ill man trying to get away.  “I’m not dead,” but “He will be soon, he’s very ill.”  It ends of course with the poor man knocked over the head, tossed into the cart and everyone else walking away satisfied.

SB 193 is sort of like the ill, plague-stricken man in the Holy Grail.  Twice last week, the House voted narrowly to refer the bill to interim study, essentially killing the bill but giving the Finance Committee an opportunity to study the finances of the system of education savings accounts (the end-around for trying to avoid constitutional issues tied up with vouchers).  Yet late on Thursday night, when the Senate took up its final bill for the session, Republicans attached the original version of SB 193 to another bill and sent it back to the House for consideration.  So, it lives on.