By KATHARINE WEBSTER, InDepthNH.org
Despite warnings from members of the Senate Education Committee that federal funds to prevent youth suicide and substance abuse could be at risk, the state Senate voted in favor of a bill requiring parents to opt in before their children can be given a behavioral health survey at school.
Although the Senate Education Committee had recommended killing House Bill 446, Republican committee members changed their minds and asked their colleagues to pass the bill Thursday, framing it as an issue of parental rights.
They did, voting 16-8 along party lines, despite warnings from Democrats that it could result in the loss of federal funding and other grants aimed at preventing youth suicides, smoking and vaping, sexual assault and substance use – because the results of the yearly Youth Risk Behavior Survey would no longer be reliable.
Sen. Ruth Ward, R-Stoddard, chair of the education committee, said she’d initially voted to recommend killing the bill. But “upon reflection, I think we got it wrong,” she said.
Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Perkins Kwoka, D-Portsmouth, said the results of the survey would cease to be statistically significant if the student participation rate drops below 60 percent. Currently, with parents able to view the survey online ahead of time and opt their children out, about 62 percent of children complete it, she said.
“We know parents are already opting out” because of the falling participation rate, she said. “We heard from police, we heard from mental health services (that) our current law works.”
Two other bills inspired lengthy debate in the Senate on Thursday: one that would allow institutions and businesses to bar transgender women from bathrooms, locker rooms and jails and prisons; and another that would allow utilities to enter into long-term, fixed rate contracts with energy providers. Both were approved and sent to a third reading, as was the bill on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
Sen. Victoria Sullivan, R-Manchester, supported the bill requiring schools to notify parents about the survey and opt their children in. She said that although the survey is supposed to be anonymous, it’s not – because questions about a student’s weight, height, nationality and family give their identity away to their teachers.
Sen. Kevin Avard, R-Nashua, also said some of the questions about sexual abuse are so “sensitive” that they can be traumatizing for children, both those who have experienced it and those who haven’t.
“The damage that could be done to a child … you can’t erase it if you put stuff in their heads,” Avard said. “This (survey) may help, but I cringe at the fact that people are making money off of this.”
Sen. David Watters, D-Dover, said the survey is indeed used by organizations like the Dover Police Department and youth services nonprofits to apply for grants so they can do prevention education, which has proven effective but needs to be updated and adapted – for example, as teen vaping has risen even as cigarette smoking has declined.
“We’re not going to make the problems go away by not finding out about them,” Watters said. “And I really think this has been working.”
He cited the Legislature’s use of the survey’s data to pass bills requiring sexual assault prevention education in schools. Under the bill, “We’re going to get junk data,” he warned.
Sen. Sue Prentiss, D-West Lebanon, who responded to suicides in her former job as a paramedic, offered an unsuccessful amendment to retain the “opt out” language. She said the governor and executive council have used data from the survey to help them fund suicide prevention programs.
“There are peaks and valleys and trends that data helps us pay attention to,” she said.
Also on the social issues agenda, the Senate majority voted for House Bill 148, which allows businesses, schools and prisons to designate bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams and prisons or jails as women-only or men-only based on what its sponsors call “biological sex.”
Democrats said that the bill would roll back civil rights protections for people who are transgender, intersex and nonbinary, while Republicans said it would protect women’s rights by protecting their privacy.
Sen. William Gannon, R-Sandown, argued for the Senate Judiciary Committee majority, citing his daughter’s experience playing soccer in high school against a tall, transgender girl. He said that, depending on when they transition, trans girls can have up to 30 percent more physical strength than cisgender girls.
“A large object and a small object, the small object’s going to lose when they collide,” he said. “So the compelling state interest is the safety of my daughter, in this case, on the sports field.”
He also argued that protecting women’s privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms is a compelling state interest, and that prison wardens have repeatedly said that “safety can’t be guaranteed (in carceral settings) when you mix males, females, trans and others.”
Democrats asked how such a law would be enforced, citing a recent complaint by a tall woman who said she was ordered to leave the women’s bathroom at a Boston hotel by a security guard who thought she was transgender. She is not.
Sen. Tara Reardon, D-Concord, cited research showing that places with similar legislation aren’t any safer for women than places that protect the rights of transgender people – but that laws similar to HB 148 make transgender people less safe, leading to harassment and even health consequences if they are afraid to use any gender-specific bathroom.
“All people deserve to feel safe. Does that mean that only applies to people we choose?” she asked. “Regression is what we’re voting on today, going back to a time when people were not free to live their lives.”
Watters reached far back in history, comparing the long struggle for equal rights waged by Black people to today’s fight over the rights of transgender people.
“Everybody’s equality might be affected by this, because anyone could stand in a restroom and any one of us could be challenged,” he said.”
The Senate’s Republican majority also voted in favor of the bill that would let the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) consider long-term contracts between electric utilities – the poles and wires companies – and energy providers. Those contracts could last as long as 20 years.
Avard, chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said House Bill 710 would incentivize utilities to invest in new, clean energy sources, particularly small “modular” nuclear plants.
However, the bill also allows the PUC to approve long-term contracts with existing power providers, including the Seabrook nuclear power plant, which is owned and operated by NextEra Energy.
Members of C-10, a nonprofit that monitors airborne radioactive emissions within a 10-mile radius of the Seabrook reactor, said at a public hearing on the plant held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week that the bill is intended to lock in high rates for Seabrook’s nuclear power – even though the plant’s concrete suffers from progressive deterioration that could force the reactor to shut down as soon as 2034.
Sen. Cindy Rosenwald, D-Nashua, who serves on the energy committee, offered a floor amendment that would exclude existing power plants from such long-term contracts, comparing them to mortgages that can’t be refinanced when rates drop.
“These long-term power purchase agreements, if we enter into a bad deal, ratepayers are stuck with those (high bills) for decades,” she said, noting that such contracts with the Millstone and Seabrook nuclear plants had cost Connecticut electric customers about $500 million over five years.
However, Watters, also an energy committee member, defended the bill, saying that electric customers face unpredictable prices when utilities are required to solicit bids from power providers every six months. He also noted that the bill will allow schools, housing authorities and communities to expand their solar arrays.
Finally, he said a long-term contract with Seabrook could well protect New Hampshire electric customers – because Massachusetts recently approved adding nuclear energy to its list of renewable electricity sources and could seek its own contract with Seabrook.
Rosenwald’s amendment failed.