#

Gov. Chris Sununu is quickly making education reform a priority during his two-year term. Just take a look at his Thursday budget speech.

“This budget and this administration recognizes local control in public education as the touchstone of policymaking, and that state government’s role in shaping education policy should be focused strictly on benefitting students and their families,” he said. “A major goal of this budget is to expand educational opportunity and choice for kids and their families.”

In his 2018-2019 biennium budget, Sununu focused on four areas of education reform that he wants to accomplish: full-day kindergarten, charter schools, higher education, and school building aid.

FULL-DAY KINDERGARTEN

Sununu’s proposal includes $9 million a year for full-day kindergarten. He said the funds, which would be awarded in addition to education adequacy grants, would target communities that need it most.

After his speech, Democrats sought clarity on how it would be determined which communities received funding.

“We also do not know from his presentation which communities will get full-day kindergarten and which ones won’t…” said New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley in a statement.

Sununu said the formula would be based on a community’s property wealth, the number of students on subsidized lunch programs, and the number of English as a second language students.

“So I am proud today to be the first governor to deliver a real full-day kindergarten program for communities across the state,” he said.

Some Democrats, including gubernatorial nominee Colin van Ostern, were in favor of requiring all school districts to offer full-day kindergarten. Sununu’s budget leaves the decision up to individual cities and towns, but if they opt for full-day kindergarten, they’ll receive more funds.

Regardless if a school district offers half-day or full-day kindergarten, they only receive 50 percent of the state’s per-pupil grant compared to students in other grades. Sununu’s proposal would give the neediest communities an opportunity for additional funds to make full-day kindergarten a possibility.

CHARTER SCHOOLS

In his speech, Sununu called for increasing charter school funding by $15 million.

“And in addition to fully funding the adequacy formula, funding for charter school is stabilized and enhanced in this budget by linking funding to the state’s average per-pupil expenditure,” he said. “This will increase funding for our charter schools by $15 million, helping eliminate uncertainty and volatility for administrators, teachers and parents.”

This is probably one of the more contentious proposals in his budget, and it will be interesting to see if that amount changes as it moves through the budget process in the Legislature.

All of New Hampshire’s 25 charter schools, except for one, rely mostly on state and federal funding, and all but one are not supported by local property taxes. In the Granite State, per-pupil expenditures for charter schools are about $6,500, which is lower than traditional public schools, which averages about $14,900 for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Sununu is a fervent school choice advocate and he’s hoping the Legislature passes charter school-friendly bills during the legislative session. Democrats claim charter schools take away state money that could go to improve traditional public schools, and they lack equal proportions of disabled or special needs students, who are then forced into the traditional public school system.

Senate Majority Leader Jeff Woodburn told NH1 News that diverting public school funding to charter schools “is the wrong direction. It doesn’t make our state stronger or our kids better.”

HIGHER EDUCATION

It’s often a criticism of the Granite State that the population is aging and young people are leaving . The million dollar question is how does the state plan on encouraging them to stay?

Higher education advocates see increased funding to the state’s community college and university system as a key investment into the future workforce of New Hampshire.

Sununu said he agrees, but university officials and higher education activists remain skeptical.

“Our higher ed system is a critical part of ensuring New Hampshire students have an opportunity to learn beyond their high school years and enter the New Hampshire workforce with real-world skills,” Sununu said in his speech. “My budget approaches post-secondary education strictly in terms of students and outcomes. The university and community college system of New Hampshire are key to these efforts, and we’ll continue to make investments in our partnership.”

He proposes a “significant increase” to the operating budget of the community college system, to the tune of $10 million for capital infrastructure investments.

However, it’s not immediately clear where those funds are coming from. A few months ago, New Hampshire’s Community College system asked lawmakers for about $49 million for 2018 and $52.5 million for 2019, an increase from about $44 million in the current budget.

In Sununu’s budget, it appears that the community college system’s proposed budget is the same amount of funding as in the current budget. He could pull the funds from infrastructure funds, but it wasn’t exactly clear where he would do that.

University System of New Hampshire (USNH) officials were not thrilled that they didn’t see an increase in their budget either. Sununu’s proposal would provide $81 million a year to the university system — the same level as the current budget. USNH asked for $88.5 million in 2018 and $93.5 million in 2019.

Without an increase in funding, it’s likely tuition will once again increase for the next academic school year at USNH colleges by no more than 2.5 percent for in-state students. The actual figure will be known later this spring after trustees set the rate.

In a statement, USNH “expressed deep disappointment” that the governor’s budget did not provide additional funding, which would have allowed the system to freeze or lower tuition for in-state students.

“Keeping our public, four-year colleges and universities affordable is not only critical for hard-working New Hampshire families, but also for the many businesses that depend on highly skilled talent to grow, thrive and succeed,” USNH Chancellor Todd Leach said in a statement.

Full time in-state tuition at UNH is $14,410 for the 2016-17 academic year. Room and board varies depending on the type of housing and meal plan, but costs range between $10,000 to $14,000 a year.

USNH receives the lowest state funding per capita of any university system in the county and tuition costs for New Hampshire students are some of the highest in the nation, which leads to students also having some of the highest student loan debt in the country after graduation.

Rep. Wayne Burton, D-Durham, and a former college administrator, criticized Sununu’s “cold shouldering of USNH.

“I’m deeply disappointed that Gov. Sununu, though professing the need for an educated workforce, shortchanged the principle player in that effort, our state university system,” Burton told the Fosters Daily Democrat.

Instead of increasing funds to the university system, Sununu proposed a new $5 million-a-year scholarship fund to assist high school students to attend colleges, universities or workforce training programs in the Granite State.

“We have to understand that not every student travels the same workforce path, and we need to build a system that provides flexibility to work within their lifestyle,” he said. “This scholarship program is designed, not to help 10, or 20, or even a 100 students, but at least 1,000 students each year, and we’ll open workforce gateways like never before.”

He said the Governor’s Scholarship Fund would be administered by a proposed commission and would be based, partially, on need.

SCHOOL BUILDING AID

The state is expected to end the current two-year budget with an $80 million surplus, and most of that money will be going to one-time expenses to fix roads and bridges, and provide school building aid through the “Infrastructure Revitalization Fund.”

“For the first time in a long time we’re going to give a boost to school building aid by granting dollars directly to communities to rebuild our classroom infrastructure,” Sununu said. “Specifically, schools with health and safety issues in towns that might not be able to otherwise address things like asbestos, lead paint, or other critical safety issues and these are where our school building aid will be targeted and funded.”

It’s unclear exactly how much of the $80 million surplus would be available at the end of the current fiscal year, and how it would it be allocated to cities and towns, but Republicans applauded the proposal during the governor’s speech.

Follow Kyle on Twitter.

Sign up for NH Journal’s must-read morning political newsletter.

When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders held their respective rallies at the University of New Hampshire this past year, Joshua Fox and other members of the UNH College Republicans wanted to stand outside the venue, hold signs, and protest.

When they were protesting, a police officer approached them and told them they needed to move to a “free speech zone” because they could potentially cause some safety problems. Fox, a sophomore at the public university, said they were forced into a small area to carry out the rest of their protest, farther away from where people were waiting to enter the rally.

“A diversity of opinions is important to college,” he testified during a House Education Committee hearing in Concord on Tuesday. “I believe every American should have their right to speak their opinion.”

UNH says presidential candidates and their Secret Service teams are allowed to put some policies in place that the university would not normally do.

But Fox said he still believes universities and colleges sometimes go too far in stifling free speech.

He supports House Bill 477 that would limit “the ability of an institution within the university system or community college system to restrict a student’s right to speak in a public forum.”

The bill states that no university or college that receives state funds “shall restrict a student’s right to speak, including verbal speech, holding a sign, or distributing fliers or other materials, in a public forum.”

Rep. Eric Schleien, R-Hudson, is the prime sponsor of the bill, which has five other cosponsors on it — all Republicans. But he said this bill shouldn’t be a partisan bill.

“The broader principle is if I am a student at a public university or college, I shouldn’t have to ask people for permission to hand out a flyer,” Schleien said.

He is referring to UNH’s policy on students needing a permit to “distribute literature” and for “outdoor assemblies.”

“Individual students and non-students who wish to solicit for contributions, distribute literature…and engage in sequential, incidental, brief and transitory verbal interactions with passersby on the sidewalks and in the parking lots on campus must first obtain a permit from the University of New Hampshire Police Department,” states Section 23.2 of UNH’s administrative rules and regulations.

That’s where Joe Cohen, legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has a problem.

He doesn’t believe students should have to get a permit to assemble a protest or pass out flyers to passersby. He also said having the police in charge of the permitting process is a problem.

“We’re not really changing the law in anyway,” he said. “We’re just changing the mechanism to give students the power to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

According to FIRE, most public colleges and universities in the Granite State do not have a high “speech code rating.”

Only Plymouth State College has a “green light” rating — when a college does not “seriously imperil speech.”

UNH and Dartmouth College received a “yellow light” rating. That’s when an institution’s policies “restrict a more limited amount of protected expression or, by virtue of their vague wording, could too easily be used to restrict protected expression.”

Keene State College received a “red light” rating, which “clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”

Cohen criticized the state’s college and university system for not having uniform free speech policies. He believes this bill will help fill that gap.

Reports of free speech violations on college campuses have reached national media outlets in the past year. One of the most recent incidents was at Kellogg Community College in Michigan where members of the Young Americans for Liberty chapter are suing the school after they were arrested in September for passing out pocket-sized copies of the U.S. Constitution without administrative permission.

While no incidents like that have been reported in New Hampshire, the Granite State public universities have seen an increase in hate crimes in the past year. A swastika was burned into the ceiling of a Keene State College dorm and at UNH. President Mark Huddleston said several students and staff had experienced harassment or threats.

Educators on New Hampshire college campuses have been trying to have an open dialogue with students about where freedom of expression ends and hate speech begins.

But Karyl Martin, assistant general counsel for UNH, said the new bill on free speech could be seen as redundant since students are already allowed freedom of speech in the First Amendment and some restrictions exist to keep students safe.

“The safety and health concerns are real,” she said. “The permitting notice allows them [the university] to be flexible to needs of the students.”

Lawmakers were also critical of the law, asking if there were any limits to free speech on college campuses.

Schleien said the courts would ultimately decide what limits exist when they interpret the law.

But Martin said it’s difficult to legislate what are reasonable restrictions.

“It also puts the expense of litigating these issues on the taxpayers when they go to court,” she said. “It would ultimately end up on them and the students.”

THE EDELBLUT WILD CARD

This isn’t the first time a bill like this appeared before the committee. In the last legislative session, former Rep. Frank Edelblut, R-Windham, introduced a similar bill (House Bill 1561) that ultimately didn’t make it out of committee.

Republican gubernatorial candidates Executive Councilor Chris Sununu, right, and state Rep. Frank Edelblut shake hands during a news conference in front of the Statehouse Wednesday Sept. 14, 2016 in Concord, N.H. Edelblut conceded the race for the Republican nomination for governor after Sununu won by fewer than 1,000 votes. He will run against his Democratic primary winner fellow Executive Councilor Colin Van Ostern. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

The main differences between the two pieces of legislation are that the 2016 bill included a clause for “spontaneous and contemporaneous” demonstration. Cohen said he would prefer that to be in the current legislation, but UNH says that could lead to more costs.

Last year, the committee referred the legislation for interim study to look more at what the cost would be for the public university and college systems.

They claimed that the law could increase costs due to litigations and a change in their current permitting system, including additional funds for police officers for those spontaneous protests.

The bill was not recommended for future legislation.

Now, without the spontaneous clause, maybe the bill has a fighting chance. Especially, with the Edelblut wild card.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu recently nominated Edelblut, who also came in a close second to Sununu in the Republican gubernatorial primary last year, to be the next state education commissioner. As education commissioner, he helps set the tone of the department and implement policy for K-12 education, as well as higher education, which includes the state universities and colleges.

His nomination is already controversial since he doesn’t come from an education background. But now that it’s likely he will be approved by the Republican-controlled Executive Council, Edelblut could help push this legislation forward. After all, he was the one who first proposed it last year.

With Edelblut in Sununu’s ear, he could give this bill a nudge forward in the Legislature.

Follow Kyle on Twitter.