AFT-NH Testimony on SB 33 relative to the regulation of public school materials
From Debrah Howes, President AFT-NH
Thank you, Chairman Ward and Members of the Senate Education Committee.
My name is Debrah Howes. I am president of the American Federation of Teachers – New Hampshire. I am here to speak on behalf of our 3500 members across the state. Our members include preK through 12 public school educators and support staff, university faculty as well as town employees. I am here today to testify in opposition to SB 33.
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.
This bill would require all school districts to adopt policies to handle complaints about materials that are allegedly harmful to minors, age-inappropriate, or otherwise offensive or inappropriate. The required policy outlined in the bill does not balance the constitutional rights and interests of all of the people involved, including students, parents and the community. It also is state infringement on local control of our public schools.
The question with broad and subjective categories such as inappropriate, offensive, age inappropriate and harmful to minors, is, “Who decides what meets those definitions?” Well, in this bill, it’s one person, the school principal, who decides. SB 33 gives the principal or their designee the sole power to investigate parental complaints and determine if access to specific material should be removed or restricted for all students in the school. The principal. Not your elected school board. Not a committee of parents, school librarians, and voters. One person only: the principal. What an attack on local control and parent voice. A solitary, noisy, complaining parent can overrule the wishes of all other students’ parents by running to the principal with a complaint. Placing sole decision making power in the hands of one person also opens up the process for potential of abuse of that power. What an invitation for one person to instill fear into teachers and school librarians, to control what your child reads and learns, to impose their own moral values on a whole public school and community.
The ultimate irony, here in a state with such a tradition of local control and individual liberties, is that this bill represents big government intruding into families' personal decisions. If a parent doesn't want their child to read a certain book, then that parent can make that decision for their own child. The government shouldn’t be doing that. The government shouldn’t be empowering censorship. Nor should the complaint of one parent control what all students can read, as would be the case under this bill. One individual or one group shouldn’t have the right to impose their beliefs on others. School officials are government actors. As such, they have a First Amendment responsibility: It’s their duty to ensure that no particular viewpoint or belief is allowed to determine what students can learn and read. In fact, a federal judge in 2024 blocked an Iowa school-book-banning law on First Amendment grounds (and for its vagueness, which is certainly a flaw that this New Hampshire bill shares).
The torrent of censorship across the country is reaching a point that is frankly, ridiculous. One school district in Florida removed the Merriam-Webster dictionary from their library shelves, to obey a state law that bans books with descriptions of "sexual conduct." What are we coming to? Does New Hampshire want to go there? This kind of government micromanagement is not the New Hampshire way.
Finally, there are some books in school libraries that can be literally lifesaving for a young person. For example, a book about surviving childhood sexual abuse. Or about realizing you’re gay. Or about questioning the rules of the religion into which you are born. For some kids, I’m talking about age-appropriate books here, being able to read such a book tells them they are not alone, they are not evil, they are not worthless. Not every book is right for every student, but if it is important to one student or a few students, it should be on the shelves.
But today we live in a climate where people, sometimes ones who don’t even have a child in school want to control what all students read or see. We live in a climate where some legislators would rather obsess about what books are in the school library, than worry about how many children don’t even own any books at home. Many kids don’t. That’s why our national union the AFT, in partnership with First Book, has given away 10 million books to students and families, and is on track to distribute 1 million more by next summer. Last year we gave away 8,000 books right here in NH. Teaching children to read is the most fundamental responsibility of schooling. We should be focused on getting books into kids’ hands, not banning them.
Government control and censorship? That’s not what we want to teach our kids.
We urge you to find SB 33 Inexpedient to Legislate.
Sincerely,
Debrah Howes
President, AFT-New Hampshire