School Choice(s) and Local Taxes

Happy Summer Hollis friends and neighbors,

I have two reasons to write about education for my June update: 

1) Hollis has always been a strong supporter of our schools, and…

2) Your local taxes are heavily dependent on education policy coming from Concord.

In this session (January – June 2025), we’ve seen bills that impede long-established local control of schools by reaching into budgets, classrooms, private conversations, and libraries. Many of these bills have been proposed and rejected in years past as solutions in search of a problem, or simply overreach. Here’s a sampling. 

SB97 is a Senate bill with two sponsors that passed the House 199-165 (on partisan lines) with an amendment (2025-1980h) which states that a parent may request the reassignment of any student to any public school, public academy, or approved private school within the school district, and the superintendent can only consider whether the requested school has the capacity to accommodate the additional student. They may not consider teacher-pupil ratios, or economic impacts to the proposed budget. The law goes on to say students may also be assigned to any school outside the district. Funding is provided by the town in which the student resides, thus, this law exacerbates public funding inequities and creates funding challenges in schools with high transfer rates. School budget management will be significantly more difficult, and the inclusion of all schools – public, private, in district, and out of district, is a recipe for chaos where we now have order.

I heard SB97 will be pulled from the Consent Calendar and debated on the floor on June 26th to prevent this bill from becoming law. We likely do not have the votes. 

The next bill, SB96, requires mandatory disclosure by school employees to parents. Here is a link to the debate. The amendment being debated in the video is to create punishments for credentialed teachers who do not meet vague language that puts them in untenable legal situations. This bill passed with amendment on partisan lines. We keep hearing that the point is parental rights. But parents are not suffering a lack of rights. Bills like this limit other people’s rights: teachers, students, school counselors, etc. Since the bill was passed with provisions that could remove a teacher’s credentials, the Senate did not concede to the House changes, and they did not sign off on the Committee of Conference report; this kills the bill for this year.  

HB324, the most restrictive book ban in the country, is currently on the governor’s desk. It applies to books, novels, magazines, videos, and historically important works of art. The stated goal is to protect children from pornography. But the definition of what is pornographic is both extensively described in the bill language, and in the eye of the beholder. The bill includes fines, penalties, disciplinary actions, and repayment of legal fees to the aggrieved person who sues a school, teacher, or librarian. This also feels like overreach and a solution in search of a problem. Do you know of anyone complaining of pornography being given to minors by schools? If enough legal actions are pursued, this will also increase taxes. 

HB771 passed on a roll call vote 189-160 in a partisan vote. This bill requires all school districts to budget tuition costs for resident students to attend any school district. This bill is costly, hard to manage, and leads to higher property taxes, program cuts, and lower standards. I think of this as a race to the bottom bill. Open enrollment is like Education Freedom Accounts, designed to siphon money from public education in a way that raises local taxes, creates instability, and weakens schools. 

People have asked me why the state would pursue a policy that has such negative consequences, and I can only point to some extremists serving in the House. We have a large (some say 120 members) contingent of elected free staters in the State House who are very much in favor of eliminating public education. These types of education laws feel like death by a thousand cuts. No Granite Stater was asking to destabilize our schools at taxpayer expense or make individual school districts responsible for funding unknown numbers of transfers at taxpayer expense. It’s like saying you’re required to maintain a balanced checkbook, but we’re going to be adding and subtracting from it as we see fit without any advanced notice. 

SB295 FN has already been signed into law by the governor to expand the school voucher programs known as Education Freedom Accounts. This expansion removes the income caps that limited the program and allowed it to be sold to the public as an effort confined to low- and middle-income students. With the number of eligible private school students who can now qualify to take tuition money from public schools they never attended, this program has become the most liberally applicable and unaccountable voucher program in the country.  

On a fiscal note, we have the most far-reaching private school subsidy, in a state that pays the least state funding toward public education of the 50 states. So, no wonder our property taxes are so high and rising; we are passing laws that increase what we are required to pay for, with less and less state money in the Education Trust Fund (ETF) by design (the recently eliminated Interest and Dividends tax partially funded the ETF). 

If you want to contact me, please feel free to reach out at kat.mcghee@gc.nh.gov or visit my website: www.katmcghee.com (which is in need of updating this summer!).

PS. As the minority leader of the House Science, Technology & Energy Committee, I often follow my colleagues with a Parliamentary Inquiry (PI) to punctuate their floor speech. Here is a link to a June 12th floor speech and PI against HB672, a bill to allow unregulated electric generation in the state. HB672 Video link to House debate