SB 219, The Students First Act, is an important bill that will crack down on sprawling, expensive school administration in New Hampshire and ensure that education spending prioritizes students first.
While low teacher pay is being used to justify higher school costs, ever-growing and bloated public school administrations are raking in the lion’s share of the budget through unchecked hiring and astronomical salaries. Thanks to the teachers’ unions, a push is currently underway in the Senate to cover for New Hampshire’s giant school bureaucracy and quietly kill the bill.
To finally stop our endlessly-increasing school costs, conservatives must reframe the debate. As NH Board of Education member Ryan Terrell has argued, NH teacher pay is not low because schools are underfunded, but because education spending is being systematically abused across the state.
CORNERSTONE POSITION: A proposed floor amendment to SB 219 would require school districts to post the six-figure salaries of diversity professionals and other high-paid administrators before school budget meetings. Cornerstone supports the amended version of this bill and advocates that the bill be passed with the amendment.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
We urge you to contact your Senator now, and tell them to stand behind teachers and students and stand up to our bloated school bureaucracy by supporting the floor amendment to SB 219. You can find your Senator and their contact info here.
On Thursday, February 23, the New Hampshire House voted 189 to 158 to defeat HB 63, a bill which would have allowed towns to unjustly target churches. Were the bill to have passed, it would have resulted in the repeal of zoning protections for religious institutions, and further discrimination against places of worship.
One area where churches often face a kind of passive aggressive hostility in New Hampshire is in municipal zoning. Many towns used zoning ordinances to specifically target and disadvantage church construction, until last year, when RSA 674:76 was enacted. This legislature prohibits zoning ordinances and planning regulations from treating places of worship more harshly than non-religious institutions.
The last section of the SB 63 included one sentence supporting the ability of religious organizations to provide for the unhoused. As Cornerstone has previously stated, we have no objection to this provision, and welcome the invitation for religious organizations to help provide care for the homeless if they choose to do so. However, the remainder of the bill would effectively repeal all of the protections provided by RSA 674:76 and allow churches to once against be targeted by municipalities.
We thank Rep. Maureen Mooney for her work in the Judiciary Committee attempting to amend the SB 63 to preserve the charitable aspect of the bill while removing the bill’s discriminatory content. We also thank Rep. Jim Kofalt, Rep. Kristine Perez, and Rep. Katy Peternel for their leadership in opposing SB 63. If you are a constituent of Reps. Mooney, Kofalt, Perez, or Peternel, we encourage you to contact them and thank them for standing up for religious liberties. You can find your representative here.
