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State House 08-2024

Tough Week for Public Education

Vouchers and Spending Caps Up Next Week

It has been a tough week for those who care about public education this week. Two harmful bills passed the House Education Finance Committee on a party line vote. First, they passed HB 675 a bill that overrides local control and has the state force a restrictive school spending cap on every single local community. Make no mistake, anti-education politicians passed optional school spending caps for Granite State communities last year, which local voters in each community where they were proposed needed to agree to adopt, and

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Vote 2025

AFT-NH local leaders and negotiating teams have spent countless hours preparing tentative agreements to be presented to the voters in March. All of that hard work comes down to one day of voting. Please help AFT-NH members bring these contracts over the finish line. 

Please share this list with friends and allies so they know how they can make a difference and support our AFT-NH locals. We know that every single vote counts.  In addition to the contracts, we are asking voters in Timberlane and Weare to vote NO on two articles which would have a devastating impact on each school district. When we show up and vote, we win. Please be sure to click MORE below to bring you to the link for the complete AFT-NH Town Meeting Guide 2025 

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AFT-NH Logo 2024

This totally unnecessary bill creates the false and frankly insulting impression that we have rampant problems with educator misconduct in so many of our public schools that it can only be solved by granting unprecedented investigatory power to the head of the Department of Education, through his hearing officers! Let me be clear, nobody wants the kind of person who would hurt students to stay in a position where they can ever do it again, whether that is as an educator, a volunteer, a sports coach, a clergy person or any other adult a child might encounter.

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The Trump administration wants to make painful cuts to education and healthcare in order to slash taxes for billionaires. The administration’s plan to “block grant” federal education programs and gut the U.S. Department of Education would rob 26 million students living in poverty of critical services and 7.5 million students with disabilities of special education support. It would eliminate career and technical education for 12 million students, threatening their future job opportunities. Slashing Medicaid and student loans could strip healthcare coverage from 10.3 million people and end access to student loans, making college

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This bill seems simple: if a parent asks a question about a student, the teacher or school employee must answer "completely and honestly" in writing within 10 days. Ideally parents and teachers should be working together as a team both focusing on the best interest of the student because we all know that is when students make the most progress academically and thrive socially and emotionally. And if this bill were limited to questions about student academic progress, classwork, homework, whether the student follows school rules while in class, gets along with classmates and is kind to others, it might be a useful framework for a collaboration between parents and teachers. Useful, that is if it didn't come with the threat of punishment for educators, because genuine teamwork in the best interest of seeing a student succeed is not produced under coercive threats.

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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.

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