Letter to the Editor:
We've likely all heard about the 'silent majority' - the significant portion of citizens who do not express their political opinions publicly. I have been a member of the 'silent majority' much of my adult life. However, that obviously changed more recently. Why? Well in part because I am retired, so speaking up does not affect my work. But also, because I have become increasingly alarmed at decisions made by our state legislature as well as the power being usurped by NH's minority.
We are allowing a group of NH citizens - a minority in my estimation - to use our legislature, social media and the bully pulpit to project their minority views on the majority. Their successes have already seriously impacted our rights, freedoms, local control, critical institutions, local property taxes and much more.
Legislators continue to whittle away at NH women's right to make decisions about their own body, health and well-being. HB 1248 proposed banning abortion at 15 days - before most people know they are pregnant and before most pregnancy tests would even be accurate. Thankfully it did not pass, but it will be back.
For those who thought a book banning effort had been blocked years ago, you may be surprised to find out the Senate just passed a bill for removing material harmful to children (print, video, etc etc), and has sent it to the House. This will allow NH's 13 requests, made last year, to ban or restrict 18 books to proceed, and will likely be the tip of a surge. Principals and School Boards will be forced to make decisions for which they will be 'damned if they do and damned if they don't'. And if they don't chose removal we'll hear cries for firing the Principal or a barrage of complaints and harassment against School Board Members. We've seen it all recently enough on another topic this minority group disagreed with.
While the legislature neglects the state's obligation to fund public education, and reduce our local property taxes, they have diverted public education funds to individuals so they can attend religious and private schools. In addition, in this session, the legislature will likely raise the income level cap for these accounts, for a family of four, from $109,500 to $156,000. Freedom Accounts are obviously no longer focused on low-income students.
And to assure there is no accountability or transparency for Freedom Accounts, the legislature voted down a requirement for families to periodically prove they still meet the income guidelines. So now, once a family is approved they will continue to receive these public funds for at least 18 years regardless of what changes in income develop.
As the state encourages more public charter schools, it is using public funds to pay for rent subsidies and other support, as well as federal dollars to support these schools. All while underfunding adequacy grants for traditional public schools. In fact the state gives more money per student to public charter schools than they provide to our traditional public schools per student.
These are "Public charter schools" in name only because there is virtually no accountability for the use of our tax dollars. This while they demand more and more reporting and control over our traditional public schools.
Adding to the disparity, the state is requiring traditional school systems to provide transportation, special education services and extracurricular activities for the charter school students. And after the transition period for the adequacy grants, the traditional public schools will receive no state support for providing these state mandated services to the public charter schools.
In fact, the legislature keeps adding state mandates for traditional public schools without including those mandates in their calculation for adequacy education grants. Hence, an array of unfunded mandates.
At what point is the silent majority -- including moderate republicans, independents and democrats -- going to coalesce in order to return decisions to the majority? Is it going to take a major incident like Croydon NH's where the school system's budget was zeroed out and suddenly the community was looking at destruction of their public school system?
If we want this to change, the silent majority will have to speak up and work together to preserve our rights, have transparency and accountability for all tax dollars, retake control over decisions affecting our bodies and keep our public schools strong.
We also need to make sure there is strong voter turnout and decide not to vote party line, in order to send different representatives to Concord. Let's return to majority rule!
Karen Burnett-Kurie
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