The NH Legislature managed to meet one day this past week, but Thursday’s snowstorm and the bitter cold led to the cancellation of Thursday’s scheduled House session.  Instead, the House will convene this Tuesday, January 9, to continue working through the remaining retained bills from 2017.  Although an additional session day on Thursday, January 11 is possible, most expect the House to finish retained bills on the 9^th and then commence committee hearings on 2018 bills.

SB 193  The big news this past week was House passage of Senate Bill 193 as amended , the bill establishing so-called “education freedom savings accounts.”  In simple terms, the bill takes funds normally distributed by the State to local school districts and places the money into accounts that can be used by parents who home-school or choose to send their children to private (including religious) schools.  The NH Constitution explicitly prohibits expending public funds in support of religious schools, so the “education freedom savings accounts” are an attempt to bypass that prohibition.  As one House member noted in debate, these accounts will act as a pass-through system, or in more direct language, as a “money-laundering” system to render public revenues into non-public money and thereby circumvent the state’s Constitution.  

Colleagues,

1)            Stipend Payment: We’ve gotten a lot of questions about when the district will be paying out the Turnaround/Head Start Stipends.  The date they gave us is January 19^th.

What:  A celebration recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. through K-12 student entries of essays, speeches, poetry and art. The theme for this year’s event is “Let us stand up. Let us be a concerned generation.”

Have questions about the Tentative Agreement?  Come to an information session to get learn more about the new contract! 

Here are charts that summarize the data from our Contract Planning survey in December-January 2018.

http://cccft.wa.aft.org/sites/default/files/article_pdf_files/2018-01/contractplanningsurveycharts.pdf

The Springfield Public Schools district offices will soon be moving to their new space at 640 A Street in Springfield, just north of City Hall. As previously reported, the district’s Administration Building, located at 525 Mill Street, was declared “seismically unsound” in a 2015 engineer’s report. After considering a number of options, the district determined that renovating a different building was more cost-effective than either bringing the existing building up to code or building a new structure.

Dear Holliston Community Members,

Bow, NH     January 3, 2018

AFT-NH President Douglas Ley released the following statement about the January 3 vote in the NH House on SB193, the so-called “voucher” bill

“AFT-NH and all supporters of public education in New Hampshire are grievously disappointed with yesterday’s initial House vote on SB193.  By a margin of 184-162, the House gave initial approval to this grievously flawed bill, sending it on to the Finance Committee for further examination before bringing it back to the floor for a final vote.