Advancing New Hampshire Public Education is a follow-on organization to Defending New Hampshire Public Education. We track education bills in the Legislature here and discuss New Hampshire education policy broadly.
Our mission is to promote legislation and policies that improve New Hampshire public education and oppose legislation we see as harmful.
Bill Duncan (waduncan AT gmail.com) is primarily responsible for the web site and the organization but draws in as many others as possible. Bill was appointed to the New Hampshire State Board of Education on May 8, 2014. Here is a short bio. Bill Duncan’s posts represent his personal opinion.
Advancing New Hampshire Public Education 
Welcome to a growing coalition of organizations and individuals fighting for public education. I represent both the Coalition for Louisiana Public Education (Facebook)and the national advocacy group Save Our Schools http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org
I encourage you to Like or Join both organizations and to seek support and advice from both. We here in Louisiana have already experienced much of the ALEC based legislation you are facing. Educators have won several court cases and against efforts to privatize since 2005 (hurricane Katrina) and are engaged in several more (currently against the constitutionality of our voucher and teacher eval bills). I look forward to your list of organizations supporting the cause. Lee Barrios, MEd, NBCT. Retired. Lobharley@aol.com
Definitely will be in touch.
We are fighting the battle in Texas as well. Actually, there are several organizations already here. The one I am involved with is Texas Kids Can’t Wait! We organized to advocate for equitable and adequate funding so that whether we win the current court battle or not, we can pressure the legislature to do the right thing for Texas kids! A whole generation of Texas kids have now gone through the K-12 years in under-funded and inequitably funded schools, all the while increasing expectations at every legislative session. About the time we started to work on this, the voucher threat arose, so we are spending time educating people about the threat of privatization as well. We welcome conversations to share and collaborate on effective strategies to preserve public education all over America!
Bonnie Lesley http://www.texaskidscantwait.org. Follow us on Twitter @txkidscantwait . Email us at texaskidscantwait@gmail.com . Perhaps together we can be a mighty force!
Great to hear from you, Bonnie. You can see how the voucher debate in NH went last year here
Will be in touch.
Bill
Hi, I’m a Peterborough Select Board Member and we’ve just created a letter that has been signed by all ConVal School Board members and representative Select Board members from all nine towns in the school district. We want to share it with districts around the state who may want to copy what we have done. The letter has been sent to all current elected officials and all candidates running in November. It doesn’t tell them how to fund education, rather that they need to elevate this issue to the top of the priorities when they are elected. Is there a way to share the PDF with your group? Thanks, Karen
Sure. Just send it to waduncan AT gmail.com. I’ll post it right away. Great idea.
I am Kathy Hubert from Newport NH using Karen’s letter our school board is sending a letter to elected officials. Monday 10/22 asking Select Board to do the same. Thinking there should be a way for active towns and volunteers to connect to follow up with legislature in 2019 and if needed court action of changes aren’t forth coming. Don’t want to recreate the wheel but let me know if anything is afoot.
That’s great, Kathy. And there is much afoot. The key is to subscribe to anhpe.org, as you have done. We will publicize everything that happens. If you send us your letter when it is all signed, we’ll post it. We will stay in touch with all community and individual efforts to coordinate during the upcoming session and beyond.
Also, Karen has established the NH Education Funding Fairness Campaign Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NHEdFundingFairness/
Kathy, that’s great news! So far I’m aware that Monadnock, Keene, and Claremont have also signed and sent the letter. We need to do some outreach to see who else. Bill, maybe we can send an email to the ANHPE list to ask who else has done so or is in process. This would be a good way to bring a list of folks together for the next steps in actually getting this work done.
I’ll do a post on that. And if you could encourage Monadnock, etc. to send their stuff, we’ll post it.
Karan, Newport Select Board will be sending a letter to candidates as well. When I get copy of both letters where should I send them.
Karan, I have the letter I emailed them to Mary, please let me know how to get th3m to you