By Brian Hawkins, NEA-New Hampshire Government Relations Director
When the legislature returns for the 2022 legislative session, the first order of business will be addressing vetoes and retained bills (bills held in committee from 2021). One of those retained bills held in House Education was HB 607, creating a local school voucher program. Republican leadership on the House Education committee muscled a recommendation to pass this bill with an amendment, even permanently replacing one of their own members from committee who would not vote for this bill, to do so. The legislation would grant parents 80% of money raised and spent by the local school district per pupil, minus special education portion, to pay for private or homeschooling. As many of you know the bulk of school funding comes from the local education tax, making this a significant expansion of the current school voucher program. There is no income limit either on this program and so wealthy families’ private school education would be subsidized by local property taxes, and that lost revenue would have a tremendous impact on school districts.
We are urging members to reach out to their state representative(s) now before this bill is taken up on January 5th and tell them to oppose this dramatic expansion of the school voucher program.
Bill Filings
We have now seen around two-thirds of the bill language from next year’s House bills and still awaiting most Senate bill language. As we can tell the legislation filed really focuses in on 3 broad areas of concern for NEA-NH members:
- Proposed expansions of school privatization programs, through school vouchers like with HB 607 mentioned earlier. We are also seeing bills to expand the education tax credit program, as well as the current school voucher program tucked into the state budget bills this year, and is already 5,000% over budget.
- Various types of legislation to further restrict or intimidate educators into not teaching accurate curriculum, a continuation of this past year’s banned concepts law. Some of you may have seen the “Teacher Loyalty” legislation, HB 1255, which would double down on the current law and attempt to punish educators for teaching accurate representations of the history of the country’s founding and make violations of the proposed law a violation of the educator code of conduct.
- Numerous proposals to limit safety measures schools or employers can take around COVID-19 such as mask wearing and the use of vaccines.
In addition to these pieces of legislation that are an assault on public education, educators and students, there are also some positive initiatives that NEA-NH has been a part of advancing for next year:
- Limiting or eliminating the unaccountable school voucher program
- Repealing and replacing the banned concepts law with legislation that will protect an educator’s ability to lead an accurate and honest education in the classroom,
- Advancing more health and safety legislation to make school buildings safer,
- Making sure students have access to school meal programs and taking steps to improve their nutritional value
State Board of Education Update
Last month NEA-NH delivered testimony opposing the limiting of a school district’s ability to go remote should they have a COVID outbreak. Thank you to all those who submitted comments and feedback from our survey, it was instrumental in putting our feedback together to the Board. As of the agenda posting today, December’s State Board of Education meeting did not have a final proposal to put forward on this subject matter. It is scheduled to be addressed in January. We hope the board heard loud and clear that there must be an option for schools to go remote temporarily if needed and not be penalized for doing so.
Questions
As always, please feel free to e-mail me with questions on the latest update, and look our for upcoming online actions in preparation for the important votes taking place during the first days of the session.