Legislative Update Report

NEA-NH Statement on This Week’s Supreme Court Rulings

Citing the United States Supreme Court cases decided this week allowing for businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens, eliminating affirmative action in higher education admissions, and disallowing President Biden’s student loan debt relief, NEA-NH President Megan Tuttle said today, “This Court is out of step with a majority of Americans.” “As New Hampshire faces a shortage of teachers and support staff, the state is struggling to establish policies that attract people into the profession and his ruling shrinks the pool of potential educators.” NEA-NH believes that educators and education employees should look like the communities where they work. The Court […]

NEA-NH: While Still Lacking, Budget Contains Items We Can Support

Today, the House voted to concur with the budget passed yesterday by the Senate. “NEA-NH believes that budgets should reflect our shared priorities by funding critical programs that serve our students, especially those most in need,” said Megan Tuttle, NEA-NH President. “While there are many needs the Legislature must still address, the budget approved today by the General Court contains items that we support, such as increased funding for many districts chronically impacted by our state’s inadequate school funding formula, a long overdue boost to educators’ retirement, and a start to addressing the shortage of educators in New Hampshire,” said […]

Legislative Update: House Passes Budget Version

State Budget Gets an Upgrade with Bi-Partisan Agreement – Still More Work to Do This week House Democratic and Republican leaders reached an agreement to make changes to the House Finance committee version of the trailer bill to the budget that helped the legislation pass on a voice vote in the House this week. Just days before this, such a result was unthinkable with major objections to the bill raised by NEA-NH around the education portion of the budget as well as several other labor and advocacy groups. House Democratic leadership brought those concerns to the negotiating table, and produced […]

Legislative Update: Budget, budget, budget

State Budget Heads to the House Floor – Tell Your Rep. Don’t Support a Budget that Attacks Public Education! The budget proposal being sponsored by House Republicans has a lot of problems in it for public education and will have a vote on the floor on Thursday April 6th. This budget contains a massive expansion of the school voucher program that will grow the program exponentially (we believe much more than the estimates that the Department of Education provided to the budget writers). The proposal goes far beyond what even the Governor suggested in his budget because several provisions have […]

House Version of So-Called “Parental Bill of Rights” Fails

Week’s Recap – March 25, 2023 In a marathon 2-Day Session HB 10, the first of the so-called “Parental Bill of Rights” went down in the House. We successfully defeated the committee amendment for HB 10 by 4 votes and then the motion to pass the original legislation by 6 votes (189-195). This was accomplished with 191 Democrats and 4 Republicans. The bill was then tabled by just 1 vote before a vote to kill the bill could be executed. So, that meant keeping our Republicans who voted against the bill from wavering and our Democratic attendance up for the […]