In December 2017, Gov. Chris Sununu created the Advisory Council on Diversity and Inclusion to help identify how the state of New Hampshire could foster a more diverse, inclusive and equitable environment, including by combating discrimination.
He created the advisory council following a series of racial bias incidents across the state, such as the attempted lynching of a biracial boy in Claremont, multiple instances of racial bias on the UNH campus and another at Oyster River High School.
Given the targeting of young people in all of these incidents, the advisory council knew that diversity, inclusion and equity in our schools would be a focus. What we found was that school-based discrimination is a pressing issue facing families across New Hampshire.
As members of the advisory council, we knew our first task was to hear directly from local communities. To do this, we conducted listening sessions across the state, from Lancaster to Nashua, from Claremont to Portsmouth, and the Monadnock region. At these sessions, many issues were raised, but one in particular came up time and time again by a variety of community participants.
Parents, teachers and students repeatedly stood up to ask the governor’s advisory council to help better protect our young people from discrimination in public schools. The concerns and requests for help were not about any one school district. Rather, we heard a common concern across the state that too many students are confronting discrimination in our schools, impeding their education and even their well-being.
We heard about how students of color and students with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to exclusionary discipline, like long-term suspensions. We heard about students experiencing unequal access to educational opportunities due to their race or national origin. We heard about students’ inability to obtain learning-ability testing because of language barriers. We heard about students being excluded or segregated from school activities because of disability, gender identity or national origin. We heard about harassment and bullying on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, national origin, gender identity and race.
One of the alarming facts that came to light is that New Hampshire does not provide students with any state-level non-discrimination protections – one of the few states in the Northeast that does not. Instead, it relies on piecemeal federal protections, which are subject to change in response to national politics and difficult to enforce for Granite State families.
This is why the advisory council strongly recommended to the governor last fall that “New Hampshire enact a state statute that prohibits discrimination against students in public schools based on race, color, sex, religion, national origin, mental or physical disability, gender identity or sexual orientation.”
The recommendation was taken up this legislative session in the form of Senate Bill 263, which would provide public school students with comprehensive nondiscrimination protections. Not only would this enable parents to seek an injunction from discriminatory actions via the state courts, it would also provide the N.H. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Unit with jurisdiction in cases of student discrimination. Currently, the N.H. Attorney General’s Office does not have such jurisdiction, preventing it from intervening in these types of cases.
SB 263 received strong bipartisan support in the Senate, with a floor vote of 20 to 3. The House Education Committee subsequently improved the bill by adding a provision to enable parents to seek redress via the Human Rights Commission rather than only through the courts. The House floor also voted to move the bill forward, and it is now before the House Judiciary Committee before going back to the House floor in the coming weeks.
This bill is not just responsive to the input received at the advisory council’s listening sessions across the state; it is also directly responsive to the charges given by Gov. Sununu to the advisory council at its inception. The executive order creating the advisory council explicitly charges the council with reviewing laws and recommending legal changes to further combat discrimination, and to recommend revisions to the scope and duties of the HRC to again combat discrimination.
As members of the governor’s advisory council, we heard from Granite Staters from all regions of the state, and we implore the Legislature to support SB 263 and protect our young people from discrimination in our public schools. We provide employees with robust protections from discrimination, making the absence of such protections for young people all the more glaring. Our students are our future, and they deserve to go to school free from discrimination.
(Devon Chaffee is executive director of the ACLU of New Hampshire. Dottie Morris is the associate vice president for diversity and inclusion at Keene State College. Allyson Ryder is associate director of Leadership NH.)