State House News

SB 101 OPEN ENROLLMENT HEARING RESUMES ON APRIL 1^ST

Open enrollment continues to dominate the education space in the State House with a new amendment and scheme introduced this week. Basically, instead of using local property taxpayers to directly pay for a student to attend a public school in a different district, the amendment provides open enrollment students with twice the state adequacy aid than is received for students enrolled in their own school district. The state is now offering to pay twice the adequacy amount if you want to attend a charter or if you want to go to a different public

Open Enrollment Scheduled for a Public Hearing

Action Needed

Open enrollment is back. Next Week Senate Bill 101 will be heard in the House Education Committee. A quick recap of where we stand on Open Enrollment. Back in January, the Senate attached open enrollment to an unrelated bill HB 751 with the intent on ramming it through the legislature and quickly getting it to the Governor.

The rush was to pass a statewide open enrollment law before voters at annual school district meetings had their say on whether they wanted to pay for any student who decided to transfer to another public school

Huge Victory for Public Employees’ Union Rights and Collective Bargaining

It was a great victory for our members and public employees across the state when the NH House defeated HB 1704 this week. The bill is dead for the rest of this legislative session. But let’s remember this in November.  This bill was poised to significantly weaken the rights of teachers, school staff, and other municipal employees to negotiate for strong contracts and have a meaningful voice in the workplace.  A big thank you to the hundreds of you who contacted your state representatives and help prevent this bill from

Public Employee Union Rights Scheduled for a Vote – ACTION Needed

Next week will be a big week for public education on the House floor. The union-busting HB 1704 will finally be voted along with a large number of other significant bills.  Our two significant priority bills requiring action are listed below. Please take a moment to weigh in on these requested actions.

Town Meeting Day - VOTE

Tuesday is an important day for schools across our state. AFT-NH local members have spent months negotiating collective bargaining agreements which will be presented to the voters. Please refer to our AFT-NH

Significant Committee Action Next Week

This Sunday we set the clocks forward to spring ahead. Let’s take those extra minutes of sunshine to keep a watchful eye on the NH Legislature as they resume activity after the February break.

All bills that need only be considered by one committee are due out next week which means we will be seeing a lot of votes from committees on bills that we care about. This week we will share the list of bills to get a vote in the executive session; these bills will not require your action yet but we will share for ongoing awareness.

Last week, there were hearings on

Legislative February Recess

We are just over a month away from legislative crossover where all the Senate bills that passed the Senate will be heard by the House and all the House bills that passed will be heard by the Senate. There are a number of bills scheduled for public hearing next week, so please our tracker at the end of the bulletin.

We did want to point out one bill in particular that passed yesterday, HB 1792, “The Classroom Censorship Mandate” bill that frankly lies about the goals of teachers in New Hampshire, what they are teaching and how they are teaching it. That bill passed the