InDepthNH.org (https://indepthnh.org/author/andru-volinsky/)
Trump and Ed Secretary McMahon have decreed that social workers, nurses (including ARNPs), physician assistants, physical therapists, educators, engineers, audiologists, architects, and accountants are not professionals.
On October 17th the NH Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, put another nail in the coffin of public education in NH.
I was working through a couple of topics for this week’s Substack post but I can’t get beyond the abject betrayal orchestrated by NH’s Senator Jeanne Shaheen with an assist by NH’s junior senator, Maggie Hassan.
NH school districts are failing financially even though NH has among the highest per pupil costs in the nation. The often cited per pupil spending figure, however, is misleading.
Of course, my readership is biased towards fixing a very broken system in real and substantial ways. I get it. You read me for a reason. However, the responses were encouraging.
NH’s minimum wage matches the federal level which is $7.25 an hour ($15,500 annually if one works 2000 hours). NH is the only state in New England that still uses $7.25 as its minimum wage. Only fourteen other states join NH in this scrimiest of the scrimy status.
This post will be brief but it’s in response to the Free-Staters/Republicans (and maybe some newer justices and a governor or two) who cannot see that the drafters of our state constitution intended to recognize a right to a state-funded public education.
Half a dozen or so school districts have recently failed financially in NH. Manchester is not far behind.
The Claremont School District was the lead plaintiff in the historic case that resulted in the NH Supreme Court’s recognition of a constitutional right to a state-funded quality education and a finding that NH’s system of funding schools was unconstitutional.