Jen Bisson of Sandown is involved in public education advocacy and formed Support Our Schools New Hampshire (SOS NH). For more information, visit facebook.com/SOSchoolsNH. She lives with her husband and their two young daughters.
Editor’s note: This My Turn has been updated to include a clarifying phrase about the initial proposal of HB 1671, before it passed with amendment.
I was born and raised in New Hampshire by parents who were born and raised in New Hampshire. I attended my local public schools as did my parents before me. Today, I am raising two daughters in the same state I have called home for over 40 years, but unlike my parents before me and their parents before them, I am scared about the future of my children’s public education.
Concerns about the health of New Hampshire’s public education started to grow when the noise became too hard to avoid. I was baffled by the sudden CRT hysteria that seemed to come out of nowhere. CRT has never been taught in our public schools. Why try to create mass panic over a non-issue? As school board meetings began to get more and more out of control, so too did the anti-public school propaganda.
As I started to pay closer attention, I learned that the noise and negativity are one small part of a national effort to defund, dismantle and privatize public education. Although this is happening across the country, New Hampshire is being hit exceptionally hard. Unfortunately, New Hampshire’s public schools are under attack from the inside with the help of Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.
Why does Frank Edelblut pose such a threat to our public schools? It isn’t necessarily because he lacks experience in public education as a teacher, school board member or public school parent (his seven children were all homeschooled). Edelblut is a real threat to our public education because he is a political appointee who places political ideology above our public school students.
Edelblut takes every opportunity to instill a climate of fear for our children’s teachers. Most recently, he wrote an op-ed where he claimed that our children are being harmed by “activist” teachers. In reality, Frank Edelblut is harming our children’s education by acting as an activist commissioner.
Edelblut also took it upon himself to establish a website to report teachers suspected of violating the intentionally broad “divisive concepts” law. Not only has he failed to speak out against a local fringe group that has offered a $500 bounty for the first person to file a “successful” complaint against a teacher, but he also appeared more than happy to pose for pictures with this same fringe group at the recent New Hampshire Liberty Forum held in March.
During this legislative session, Edelblut introduced HB 1671, a bill that would have redefined what domains should be required and taught in schools. Edelblut’s proposal would have removed art, music, health, world languages, physical education, engineering, computer science, and digital literacy from the core academic domains that public schools are currently required to teach. If HB 1671 had been successful as initially proposed, the bill would have changed the face of education in New Hampshire as we know it.
Frank Edelblut does not represent New Hampshire values, nor does he represent the majority of parents and families in our state. Frank Edelblut is a real threat to the education and well-being of my children, and to the state my family has called home for five generations.
I ask that Governor Sununu please demand Frank Edelblut’s resignation and appoint a new commissioner of education with experience and dedication towards strengthening our public schools throughout the state. Appoint a commissioner of education who will ensure that the 90% of parents who utilize public schools can rest easy at night knowing their children’s schools will be safe from attacks to defund and dismantle them.
We are counting on you to do what is right.