3/28/25: NEA-NH Legislative Update

 in Legislative Action / Legislative Update / Legislative Update Report (updated on )

This Week’s Re-Cap 

This week was another tough week; the House and Senate cast floor votes, largely on party line, to approve the following bills:  

  • SB 295 – Senate Universal Voucher Bill 
  • SB 96 – Mandatory Disclosure Bill for Educators 
  • HB 90 – Creating the Status of an Unlicensed Part-Time Teacher 
  • HB 324 – House Version of a Book and Material Ban 
  • HB 356 – Allowing School Districts to Adopt Partisan School Elections 
  • HB 520 – Access to Subpoena Power for DOE Educator Code of Conduct Investigations 
  • HB 699 – Changing Certain Definitions in Special Education 
  • HB 741 – Requirement that each Public School be an Open Enrollment School 

Each of these bills will now “crossover” to the other body and start the process again. This begins with a new round of public hearings, most likely sometime in April. You can look up the bill language on each of these bills and their status using theNEA-NH bill tracker. 

HB 2 – State Budget: Voucher Expansion and Mandatory School Budget Caps 

This week, the House wrapped up much of its work on the state budget and thus far it is not pretty. The subcommittees working on the budget are recommending to the full Finance Committee a draconian budget that cuts critical services for working families and children while also expanding the assault on New Hampshire’s public schools. 

Voucher Expansion 

Sadly, many of these cuts are a result of lost revenues due to years of politicians prioritizing tax cuts for businesses and wealthy people as well as continued expansion of the state’s unaccountable school voucher scheme. Now lawmakers want to eliminate income eligibility requirement for vouchers, the cost of which will be put on the backs of property taxpayers. Further, these backwards budget priorities could result in the loss of health care for our most vulnerable citizens, including our students, and the closing of agencies that look out for our young people and those who are discriminated against. 

ACTION REQUEST: Please tell your state representative(s) to reject voucher expansion. Instead, they should fund the critical needs our working families have by investing those dollars in things like property tax relief, special education funding or preventing cost shifting onto working and poor families and kids.  

Forced Spending Cap 

The other proposal being weighed in the state budget is the inclusion of the language of HB 675 which would place an extreme, arbitrary spending cap on school district budgets. The budgets would be based on the greater of either the 5-year average percent change in attendance being applied to the previous year’s appropriation or a five-year average of appropriation. This would essentially freeze or require reductions in budgets in perpetuity unless a 2/3 supermajority vote could be mustered among the legislative body. This provision would make it nearly impossible in many districts to negotiate and fund raises or maintain health benefits without also cutting budgets. There are also many services school districts are required to provide, so an arbitrary budget cap like the one proposed under HB 675 would likely force schools to reduce or eliminate areas like arts, sports, AP offerings, and more.   

ACTION REQUEST: Urge your state representative(s) to reject HB 675 as part of the state budget bill because it would cripple schools’ ability to keep up with essential costs to hire and retain the educators needed to educate our kids. 

NEA-NH Bill Tracker 

You can also follow all the bills we are watching next week by checking out our NEA-NH bill tracker.   

NEA-NH Legislative Advocacy Toolkit 

Most of the tools you need to be a legislative advocate for public education are right at your fingertips through NEA-New Hampshire. Check out our new NEA-NH Legislative Advocacy Toolkit here to get all the information you need on how to communicate with your state representatives and senators, support and oppose specific bills, and testify in Concord. 

Questions?  

If you have questions on any of these bills or ones not mentioned here, please feel free to contact Brian Hawkins, NEA-NH Director of Government Relations at bhawkins@nhnea.org.