More Book Banning and Retirement Bills

Week in Review    The noise and activity of the presidential primary campaigns have cleared out, but the NH legislature continues to churn in Concord. This past week the legislature heard, and committees voted on, dozens of bills including one bill that would expand the school voucher program so that municipalities would have to foot the bill and one bill that would eliminate all but history, math, English and social studies from mandatory public school curricula. This bill, as introduced, would further exacerbate the gap in our public schools where schools in property rich communities will be able to continue offering a robust variety of subjects important to a well-rounded education like art or music, advanced sciences and upper-level math or in-person financial literacy. Students in property poor towns won’t have those as dedicated subjects, although they could get a passing mention in a core class. Their public education will suffer because of it, yet they are still Granite State citizens with the same constitutional right to an equally robust public education regardless of which district they reside in New Hampshire.

HB 1652 would create a local voucher program that could easily decimate our local neighborhood public schools and rapidly increase already burdensome property taxes across New Hampshire. The new program will further impoverish our neighborhood public schools, leaving our students with only a threadbare education. AFT-NH President Deb Howes testified in opposition to this bill before the House Education Committee today.

Week in Review   This week the House Education Committee heard four separate school voucher bills. Three of those bills equated to universal voucher programs meaning that anyone of any income level could access the voucher program. What does this mean in practice? According to analysis by Reaching Higher New Hampshire at Reaching Higher NH  Universal Voucher Analysis 1-12-24 it would cost the state an additional 82 million dollars a year, with a total cost of the voucher program being north of $100 million dollars.

AFT-NH President Deb Howes testified in opposition to HB 1419 (yet another book banning bill)

"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 public school has enough resources to provide every student individual attention from the teacher, learning and behavior support for those who need it from trained paraprofessionals, school counselors and nurses, quality learning resources and all the other components of a robust public education. Instead, we get a bill that will divide communities, pitting families against each other, and make it easier to remove books from school libraries.

This is not the New Hampshire way where we highly value our individual freedoms. We see ourselves as different from the rest of the country, where nearly 250 years since our country’s founding, some Americans are still attempting to restrict others’ basic freedoms. Today, thousands of books in school libraries and classrooms have been caught up in a torrent of censorship. Public schools have become a cultural battlefield when they should be insulated from politics so they can focus on providing children with a strong, well-rounded education."

Education Funding   Last week in addition to the bills we have previously highlighted, the House Education Committee focused on bills that look to solve our school funding problem. New Hampshire ranks 49^th in state aid to our public schools, and even in the face of numerous previous court rulings that declared our funding formula unconstitutional, the legislature has not found anything close to the right solution to fix our school funding problems. That means that the 160,000 students that attend their neighborhood public school in New Hampshire have public educations that vary due to zip code as our reliance on property taxes cause some districts to be able to afford smaller class sizes and more robust educational opportunities for their students. Every Granite State student has the constitutional right to a robust public education and it does not depend on where they live in the state.