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A public school teacher was fired for taking a student to an abortion clinic without informing that child’s parents, according to a New Hampshire Department of Education investigative report.

In response to criticism about his statements regarding the inappropriate behavior of some public school employees, Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut released a cache of reports and complaints brought to his department. Included is the investigative report regarding a teacher who called in sick to take a student to have an abortion.

Edelblut declined to comment on the report. The details are scant, and no one in authority would speak to NHJournal on the record about the incident. The names of the school, administrators, and teacher are all redacted, as is the identity of the student. 

According to the redacted document, the teacher had been counseling the student for weeks about her “options,” then helped her terminate the pregnancy.

The teacher reportedly looked up the clinic before the appointment out of concern for the student’s safety. The teacher then called out sick from work with food poisoning in order to go with the girl to the clinic.

“[The teacher] stated that the student didn’t have anyone to support them so they offered to go with them,” the investigation found. 

The teacher was fired soon after administrators discovered the matter, according to the report.

The incident raises questions about transparency at public schools, and reopens the debate over school systems like Manchester that have a policy of keeping information secret from parents. Some New Hampshire lawmakers are outraged.

“I am horrified to hear that a teacher in our New Hampshire schools felt the right way to help a pregnant student who felt unsupported in her pregnancy was to research abortion facilities and call out sick to take a student to an abortion rather than to help her speak with her parents and find support from her family,” said state Rep. Erica Layon (R-Derry).

State Sen. Tim Lang (R-Sanbornton), who’s championed greater parental access to classroom activities and curricula, said schools must stop keeping secrets from families.

“Parents have the right to know everything that is happening to their child in school. Keeping secrets or going behind a parent’s back is never good public policy,” Lang told NHJournal. “It’s not good for the child, either. It teaches children, by the actions of ‘trusted adults,’ it’s OK to be deceptive, which is not creating good citizens for our future.”

Layon says the student’s parents had a right to know.

“By taking the rightful place of that student’s parents, this teacher denied her family the opportunity to step up and support her,” Layon said. “Undermining families should not be taken lightly, and assuming the worst of parents is a dangerous precedent.”

Melanie Israel, the Visiting Fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, said New Hampshire parents ought to be concerned that teachers feel entitled to act to this degree.

“I don’t think most parents would be OK with this,” Israel said.

The report indicates the teacher counseled the student during school hours, and then called out sick to take the girl for an abortion — also during school hours. Israel noted public school students generally need parental permission to leave campus or go on field trips.

“This brings up questions for a lot of parents, like who are they entrusting their children to for hours on end everyday? What kinds of interactions outside of teaching are teachers having with their students?” Israel said.

The investigative report does not address whether the teacher broke state law. The age of the student at the time of the abortion is not disclosed in the redacted report, but if she was under legal age, New Hampshire law requires parents to be notified.

The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office declined to comment on the incident and whether or not the teacher faces possible criminal charges.

Israel said New Hampshire parents deserve to know if any laws were broken in the incident. They should also be aware that if Democrats get their way, parents won’t ever know if their underage daughter is brought to get an abortion by an adult teacher, she said.

President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies are pushing the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would override all state abortion laws, including parental notifications for minors who seek to terminate their pregnancies, Israel said.

New Hampshire’s all-Democrat federal delegation is united behind a federal abortion law that would supersede the laws passed by Granite Staters through their local legislators.

“If this bill were to become law, parents would have no recourse,” Israel said.

On her way out the door, former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig and her fellow Democrats approved a $290 million bond to fund new school construction across the district.

The question now is, who’s going to show up to attend them?

For years, Manchester enrollment has declined, even as spending has soared. But the impact of the COVID pandemic has contributed to a new problem: chronic absenteeism. Kids are enrolled, but they’re not showing up.

According to New Hampshire Department of Education data released this week, Manchester’s high school reported an 85.7 percent attendance rate for the 2022-2023 school year, among the lowest in the state.

Chronic absenteeism is when an individual student has at least 10 or more unexcused absences from school per year. The state average for high school attendance in the 2022-2023 school year was 90.8 percent, and the average for all grades was 92.3 percent.

Manchester’s total attendance for all grades was 89.2 percent.

(New Hampshire’s data does not differentiate excused absences from unexcused, leaving the public with just the rate of attendance.)

Manchester is hardly alone.

A new report from the American Enterprise Institute using data from 40 states and the District of Columbia estimates that 26 percent of public school students were chronically absent last school year, up from the pre-pandemic rate of 15 percent. This study defines chronic absenteeism as missing 10 percent of a school year, which is nearly a month of classroom instruction.

New Hampshire, with one of the best-educated states and top-performing education systems, isn’t seeing numbers as low as the national average. But attendance among Granite State students has declined, and Manchester Mayor Jay Ruais tells NHJournal city leaders know they need to do more to get kids in class.

“School attendance is critically important, particularly coming out of the pandemic and mitigating the learning loss experienced during these unprecedented times. The Manchester School District initiated an attendance campaign last summer, which has played an important role in increasing attendance in the schools,” Ruais said.

“We are not where we want or need to be, but by embedding attendance goals into the core objectives of every school, we are reaffirming our commitment to providing a supportive and conducive environment where every student has the opportunity to succeed academically.”

Student attendance took a major dip during the pandemic years, and while the rates in New Hampshire are improving, Manchester Superintendent Jennifer Chmiel Gillis said more is being done to get kids back into the classroom.

“In the last year, we hired a district-wide attendance coordinator and launched our Show Up Manchester attendance campaign,” Chmiel Gillis said. “Additionally, schools have built attendance improvement into their yearly goals. We are now starting to see the early fruits of these efforts between the district and schools, with attendance increasing at all grade levels. We have more work to do, but we are encouraged by the progress and will continue moving forward.”

Experts say the social isolation that was created by social media and boosted by extended school closings is fraying the social connections between children and making it easier for less-motivated students to stay home.

A similar dynamic may be at play in schools, where experts say strong relationships are critical for attendance.

“There is a sense of, ‘If I don’t show up, would people even miss the fact that I’m not there?'” Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, the commissioner of education in Connecticut, told The New York Times.

Jason Bedrick, a Research Fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told NHJournal that while the causes of the current crisis are complicated, the disastrous impact of COVID-related closure cannot be ignored.

“A significant factor is almost certainly the prolonged and unnecessary school closures that the teachers unions pushed. School closures sent the implicit message that attending school in person was not necessary. Putting the genie back in the bottle won’t be easy,” Bedrick said.

Data on private school attendance rates in New Hampshire is not available.

A representative for New Hampshire’s Department of Education told NHJournal that public school attendance is once again heading in the right direction. A decade before COVID, the state’s schools averaged 95 percent attendance. In the 2021-22 school year, it fell to of 90.8 percent. Now attendance is up to 92.3 percent — a marked improvement.

“Following an academic period when respiratory illnesses often resulted in above-average absences, attendance in New Hampshire’s public classrooms are not only steady but strongly improving,” the representative said.

But in Manchester that year, attendance fell to 87 percent, and among high school students, it was a dismal 82.4 percent.

And, critics say, the Manchester School Board didn’t help matters last November when it changed school policy and ended the practice of giving a “no grade” to high school students who have five or more unexcused absences in a class they are passing.

A New Hampshire’s teachers’ union is going to court to stop the state’s popular Education Freedom Account (EFA) program that some families use to escape failing public schools. The move comes as data show traditional public school enrollment falling while the number of students choosing charter schools and other alternatives is rising.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced Thursday it filed a lawsuit against Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut in the Merrimack Superior Court in Concord challenging New Hampshire’s EFA program. The complaint argues the program violates the New Hampshire Constitution and state law by using state lottery dollars and money from the Education Trust Fund to fund the EFAs.

“The state specifically earmarked this money for public education. Instead, the state is stealing from public school students in plain sight to pay for its private voucher program,” said Deb Howes, president of the AFT-NH, who brought the suit “as a citizen taxpayer,” according to an AFT press release.

Families earning less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level can use the EFA program to take their share of state per pupil funding – about $5,000 a year — and use it for alternatives to public school, like private school, homeschooling or tutoring. The public school they leave behind keeps its portion of local per-pupil funding, which can range from $10,000 to $20,000 or more.

EFA expenses must be approved by the Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF), a private scholarship organization that oversees the program. In September CSF reported that families of more than 3,000 New Hampshire children completed EFA applications, up from more than 2,000 children who used EFAs in 2021-22.

“It underscores a growing demand from Granite State parents for educational alternatives,” CSF reports.

The national AFT’s controversial union president Randi Weingarten weighed in Thursday on behalf of the lawsuit. “New Hampshire can’t fund its voucher program by illegally putting its hand in the taxpayer cookie jar that’s intended for public school students,” Weingarten said. “It’s as simple as this: No matter what program the state wants to fund, it has to do it legally.”

The complaint is based on the premise that EFAs are illegal because the state constitution says “all moneys received from a state-run lottery [shall] be appropriated and used exclusively for the school districts of the state… and shall not be transferred or diverted to any other purpose.”

But supporters respond that EFA spending has been authorized by the legislature and that revenue from sources other than the lottery go to funding k-12 education. Since money is fungible, there’s plenty of revenue to pay for the EFA program without using lottery dollars.

“This lawsuit appears to be without merit,” said  Jason Bedrick, Research Fellow at the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “The Education Trust Fund has long been used for purposes beyond school districts, such as to place students with special needs in private schools. The state’s constitutional duty to cherish the interest of education is best fulfilled when all children have access to a wide variety of learning environments. Education Freedom Accounts further that interest.”

Howes claims the EFA program is denying public schools millions in money from the Education Trust Fund.

“Public school students are losing out on millions of dollars that are needed to fix leaky old buildings, purchase and maintain modern computer equipment, buy books and materials published at least in the last decade to support student learning, and provide more social and emotional assistance and other needs that will help students excel,” Howes said.

Representatives for New Hampshire’s Department of Education declined to speak about the lawsuit and instead issued a brief statement.

“The New Hampshire Department of Education is aware of the complaint filed today by Deborah Howes at Merrimack County Superior Court. At this time, the department is not commenting on the pending litigation,” a DOE representative said on behalf of the department.

Kate Baker Demers, the executive director for the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which administers the EFA program for the state, said the program gives parents the freedom to make their own educational choices, and is totally in line with the state constitution.

“Empowering parents to make educational decisions for their children does not violate any state law or our New Hampshire constitution,” Baker Demers said.

And, supporters note, parents are free to use the funding to transfer their child to a different public school as well.

“This is a desperate attempt by the union to block families from being able to access a wide variety of education options,” said Bedrick. “Thousands of New Hampshire families are using Education Freedom Accounts to give their children the education that best meets their individual needs. It’s sad to see the union putting their politics ahead of kids’ learning needs.”