Teachers wanted: What a N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute analysis reveals about educator retention in New Hampshire

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Teachers are essential to our school system, but what happens if there aren’t enough of them?  A new study from the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute sounds the alarm about the difficulty some New Hampshire schools already have in finding qualified teachers. According to the study, that difficulty will only get worse in the coming years. Discussing the report and its findings are its author, Ben Reynolds, a senior policy analyst at the Fiscal Policy Institute, and Michael Whaland, superintendent of schools in Moultonborough.

Melanie Plenda:

Ben, what was the reason for the study? 

Ben Reynolds:

New Hampshire is in the midst of many conversations about the future of public education, especially with this upcoming state budget. We really want to make sure that when we're having these conversations that part of them is talking about how to attract and retain the educators who really make our schools work and help our kids learn. 

Melanie Plenda:

What kind of data did the fiscal policy institute look at? 

Ben Reynolds:

We used a variety of national and state sources, specifically from the N.H. Department of Education, N.H. Employment Security, the U.S. Census Bureau and some federal higher education data as well. It's important to note though that we know we have a lot of quantitative data, but Mike can really speak about the qualitative portion of how teachers are actually feeling in the classroom. 

Melanie Plenda:

Can you sum up the key findings?

Ben Reynolds:

New Hampshire schools may face growing challenges for recruiting and retaining teachers in the year ahead. Despite the declining enrollment, New Hampshire schools will still need about a little bit over 1,000 teachers per year over the next decade.

About 95% of that drive is both from exiting labor force, such as retirements, but also from teachers leaving the teaching occupation and switching to other careers. At the same time, we're seeing that the teacher pipeline in New Hampshire is dwindling, with fewer New Hampshire college graduates getting less education degrees.

There are other challenges too for New Hampshire to attract educators. In terms of pay, New Hampshire ranks 42nd nationally for average starting teacher salary, with starting pay below comparable salaries in Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts. At the same time, high housing costs as well as child care costs are not also helping as well. 

Melanie Plenda:

Michael, I would imagine none of this is shocking to you, as you see what’s going on in your own district as well as others. What are you seeing? 

Michael Whaland

These findings align directly with what we're seeing as school leaders on the ground daily. Rural school districts are facing a double squeeze with geographic isolation as well as tighter budgets that make it harder to compete with other school districts that may have more resources and a larger tax base. We're seeing smaller applicant pools for just our general roles in particular and as well as our higher need fields, such as science, mathematics, special education, etc. 

Additionally, young teachers brought into rural communities often struggle to find affordable housing that leads to turnover and teacher churn. So it's that in combination with less students going into higher ed that also compounds as there's less teachers coming into universities and colleges as graduates.

Melanie Plenda:

Michael, you also wrote your dissertation on teacher attrition and retention in New Hampshire rural schools. Can you briefly tell us more about that? 

Michael Whaland:

My dissertation was on teacher retention and attrition in New Hampshire rural schools. When I initially began my curiosity on this subject, I started as an administrator in the North Country and started wondering why all my colleagues were leaving me. I wanted to dig deeper into this subject matter, and really, what the question that folks often ask is why are our teachers leaving? I wanted to flip that narrative and talk about why our teachers are staying. 

I looked at three different areas: working conditions, which focused more on salary and benefits; job satisfaction, which focused on climate and culture; and engagement with the community. What my study yielded, essentially, is that our educators will forego salary increases as long as you're competitive within your region. But the things that mattered most to our teachers were that they were valued, that they had a sense of autonomy and a sense of engagement with their community.

Melanie Plenda:

So why are fewer people interested in becoming teachers? What’s at play here?

Michael Whaland:

I think the perception of the profession has shifted significantly as we've identified potential educators looking at the high cost of stress and higher education costs. We've seen that the average starting teacher salary is around $44,000. That has not kept up with the costs of higher education and the housing costs. I think that the school climate — the expanding non-instructional workloads, and public education becoming more politicized has dissuaded our teachers from entering the field. I think in rural areas specifically, our potential teachers worry about geographic isolation and limited career advancement pathways. So, if you're a beginning educator and you would like to be an administrator, those jobs are few and far between. 

Ben Reynolds:

Following Mike's analysis, we found that half your teachers earn about a third less for each week worked than comparable college graduates in other professions. That's a pretty big pay gap, especially in an expensive state. When someone in college or university is looking for “what do I want to major in?” that's obviously going to take into account, and they're going to say, “I am doing all of this work, but my peers who are doing the same amount of work are going to be making a lot more money" — that makes that decision to get into education a little bit more difficult.

Melanie Plenda:

Ben and Michael, what would you say is the most immediate problem when it comes to addressing the attrition and retention of teachers? How can it be addressed?

Ben Reynolds:

One of the immediate challenges that we identified in New Hampshire is affordability. Even when schools can recruit qualified educators, high housing costs and child care costs can make it difficult for them to afford to live and work there, particularly early in their careers.

New Hampshire's median single-family house sale price increased more than 71% between 2019 and 2025, and center-based child care for an infant and four-year-old increased 33% between 2017 and 2025, to about $30,000 annually. At the same time, as Mike mentioned, teacher salaries aren't rising anywhere close to those rates, and addressing these key affordability issues will not only help to recruit teachers but ensure that they can stay there for the long term. 

Michael Whaland:

I think the immediate problem we're looking at is burnout, isolation and having supportive leadership and culture. I believe salary is what gets our teachers in the door, but working conditions and job satisfaction dictate whether they stay or not. I think that we can address this problem through a multifaceted approach, looking at administrative and peer support, building strong mentorship programs for our new teachers, finding ways for our teachers to cultivate positive school cultures based on trust, looking at their ability to have autonomy in the classroom, and community integration helps educators feel anchored in their community. 

One of the most intangible items I find in hiring in schools is fit. What I mean by that is that if you're hiring an individual that's never worked in a rural area, that's going to be a culture shock to them. So if they're exposed — whether it's through vacation, sports, recreation — they’re more apt to stay if they have some of that, as I call it, fit. 

Melanie Plenda:

What happens if these issues aren’t addressed? What will our schools look like? 

Michael Whaland:

I fear that if these issues are not addressed, that we could be looking at communities that do not have, especially in our rural areas of the state, their local schools. The elementary school is the heartbeat of their community. It's where social events happen, basketball games, voting happens — a sense of community that happens there. Without having that, I fear that that will erode the sense of community, that once was a vibrant area could in fact just be tumbleweeds. I hate to put it bluntly like that, but that's a fear. 

Ben Reynolds:

In the report, we really wanted to make it a point about explaining why teachers matter. The research shows the impact that teachers have both in student success inside and outside the classroom, and we've also highlighted the impact of having experienced teachers, not only on students but also on newer teachers in terms of staying longer, in terms of being able to professional development and teaching. That's really why these recruitment and retention challenges are so important to address.

If a school struggles to fill positions, this may increase class sizes. They may have to offer fewer courses or rely more heavily on less experienced teachers. When positions go unfilled, remaining teachers often have to take on more work and additional responsibilities. That can make an already challenging job even harder and potentially push more teachers to leave, and make it even more difficult for schools to retain the educators they need. 

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you both for joining us. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

New Hampshire Housing study dispels long-held myths about affordable housing

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

More affordable housing in New Hampshire would solve many problems for Granite Staters, so why are some communities reluctant to allow developments to come to fruition? They might be operating under some misconceptions, according to a new study from New Hampshire Housing that may go a long way to dispel those myths. Here to discuss that study is Alexsandra Galanis, New Hampshire Housing’s manager for research and data analytics. 

Judi Currie:

For people who aren’t familiar with it, can you explain what New Hampshire Housing is? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

New Hampshire Housing is a self-supporting public corporation that promotes, finances and supports housing solutions for people across the state. We work in a number of areas, including home ownership, rental assistance, financing affordable multifamily housing, and research and data. We were established by the state in 1981, but we do not receive any operating funds from the state government. 

Judi Currie:

Why did New Hampshire Housing decide to commission this study? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

One of the concerns we hear repeatedly when affordable housing is proposed in a community is that it will lower the value of nearby homes. That is an understandable concern because for many households, their home is their largest financial asset. But while that concern comes up frequently in local discussions, it had never really been tested using statewide New Hampshire data. We really wanted to move the conversation from assumptions to evidence. 

A second point worth emphasizing is that there was already research for parts of the country, but New Hampshire, as you know, is very different, and our market is very different compared to metropolitan markets like New York City, L.A. etc. We wanted a planning board to have an actual evidence-based report that is New Hampshire-specific. We wanted to know what actually happened here and make sure that the data that's being shown from other studies is actually being held true in New Hampshire communities. 

Judi Currie:

Did the results match your expectations? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

We went to the study wanting to answer four major research questions, and we knew that the existing literature showed that adding affordable housing either had no measurable impact or had, in some cases, a modest positive effect. So the overall result was consistent with the broader research, but what was important to us was seeing whether that held true in New Hampshire. 

What I found particularly interesting was how consistent the main result was when Community Scale, the consultant we hired to do the study,  tested it in different ways. We wanted to have a research firm that designed a quasi-experimental design — what I mean by that is having a study that is completely unbiased and making sure that they're using evidence-based methods to show the causal effect, not just a correlational study. 

Judi Currie:

What were the key findings? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

A little bit about the context of what the data is. The study looked at 93 affordable housing developments containing 3,124 units. These connected those developments with more than 68,000 open market home sales from 2008 through 2025. They were able to compare the results with 136 market-rate multifamily developments. 

We had four major questions. The first question was: Does affordable housing lower nearby property values? This was our biggest finding of the study, and we found no measurable average decline in nearby home values associated with affordable housing development in New Hampshire. 

The second question was: Does affordable housing have a different effect than comparable market-rate multifamily housing? Again, we found no reliable evidence of a property value penalty specific to affordable housing. 

Third was: Does the result change depending on how close you are to the development or how much time has passed? Community Scale tested different distances and different periods before and after completion, and did not find any opening shock, a construction period decline or delayed decline. 

Lastly: Does the result differ depending on the community or project type? Most of the analysis found no measurable effect. So what was striking was the consistency of the finding across a number of different ways looking at the data. 

Judi Currie:

How do myths get perpetuated and start to feel like facts?

Alexsandra Galanis:

We know housing is very personal. I think people care deeply about their homes, their neighborhoods and their communities. So when something new is proposed, there are naturally questions and concerns, and I think the belief can become accepted as fact when they hear it repeated often enough, particularly when there has not been local data available to test it.

Anecdotes can also be very powerful. Someone may point to one property or one neighborhood and just generalize that experience to every affordable housing development. That is why research like this is so useful. It lets us take a claim that people have heard for years and ask, “What does the evidence actually show when we look across the entire state?”

I just want to reiterate that New Hampshire Housing wants to build more housing, so it was important that we hire a consultant who really has no stake. They're just using the data and they are really applying all of the statistical models and applying the actual experiments and making sure that the data is robust and testing it to ensure that the results are replicable. It's important that we also want to make sure that we're putting evidence-based data that's unbiased out there, and then we're able to have Community Scale do the analysis. 

Judi Currie:

What other kinds of housing myths would fall into this category? 

Alexsandra Galanis:

Another good example is the concern that building more housing, particularly multifamily or workforce housing, will overwhelm local schools and significantly increase education costs. New Hampshire Housing actually has studied that question several times over the past two decades, but most recently, we commissioned Urbanomics to conduct a study called, "From Homes to Classrooms.” I definitely recommend checking that report on our website. They did a great analysis, and they looked at the relationship between new housing development and public school enrollment in New Hampshire. What the study found was pretty interesting. 

Statewide, the number of public schools to students per housing unit has actually declined over time, from about 39 students per housing unit in 1990 to 29 today. When they look specifically at housing built between 2014 and 2023, new housing generated about zero to 16 public school students per unit statewide. I think that, on average, housing built between 2014 and 2023 generated an estimated net fiscal benefit of about $1,700 per unit for local school districts. I won't go into much more detail, however, I think this type of study also really helps to debunk some myths about what it can mean to add more multifamily housing and the impacts on school districts and communities.

This type of study is very similar to the property values question because these are understandable concerns. People are thinking about their schools, their property taxes and their communities, but sometimes an assumption gets repeated for years until it becomes accepted as fact. What studies like these allow us to do is actually look up the New Hampshire data and see where the assumptions hold up. That doesn't mean new housing never brings additional students. Of course, some new households have children. The point is that the data does not support the assumption that every new housing unit equals a new student, or that multifamily housing automatically overwhelms the school system. 

Judi Currie:

What else would you like our audience to know about the state of New Hampshire’s housing stock?

Alexsandra Galanis:

The bigger overall picture is that New Hampshire still does not have enough housing that people can afford at different stages. Even myself — I mean, I'm still a renter. I'd love to be able to buy a home. I just unfortunately cannot afford it given my income levels. I really recommend looking at our recent 2026 housing report publication that we put out last month. The median single-family home price reached $575,000, and only about 15% of New Hampshire households can actually earn enough to afford that priced home. 

Housing availability is also increasingly connected to our workforce and economy, because employers need workers. They need to be able to find housing within a reasonable distance of their jobs. If you're a nurse, you may need to be on call. You don't want to be living an hour away from the hospital. You need to be at least 30 minutes and be able to come in at an appropriate time rather than having to live further away because that may be more affordable. 

When we talk about needing more housing, we're not talking about one type of housing. We need starter homes, apartments, workforce housing, affordable housing, housing for older adults, and opportunities for people who want to downsize. A healthy housing market has choices, and I think that right now we're still in a seller's market. Right now, we're at like 2.3 months supply. Anything under six months is considered a seller’s market, so I think the connection back to the study is that if we're going to address that shortage, communities need good information when they are considering new housing, and we want those conversations to be based on what the evidence tells us rather than assumptions that may prevent needed housing from being built. 

Judi Currie:

So interesting! Thank you. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

The ongoing fight to defend the First Amendment’s five freedoms

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

What freedoms does the First Amendment grant us? It says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” As great, and as revolutionary, as those words are, we have been fighting about what they mean — and protect — almost as long as they have been around. Here to discuss the First Amendment, the White House journalist ban and its impact is attorney Gregory V. Sullivan, the President of the New England First Amendment Coalition and Malloy and Sullivan.

Melanie Plenda:

What were your thoughts when you learned about the White House ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

Oh, thoughts went to places like Red China, Russia, and Iran. That's where the government controls the media and what the people get to see and hear. I called it at the time a disgrace, and I certainly don't shy away from using that word again. 

I obviously am someone who believes deeply in the importance of the First Amendment. I often say it's the cornerstone of our democracy, our rights to five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, as you recited them, are sacred and should be held sacrosanct by every government official as well as every citizen, but particularly those with a responsibility to administer the government. 

Under the current administration, this is not something new. They've been attacking our five freedoms, particularly freedom of speech and press, on an ongoing basis throughout both terms of President Trump, but particularly during this second term. It's not just the press corps that's being abused by the government — colleges, libraries, law firms, across the board.

The rule of law, and particularly with respect to the First Amendment, is just ignored and abused by this administration. I said the other day, either they're ignorant of what the First Amendment means, or they're willfully choosing to disrespect it, and that costs all of us. 

Melanie Plenda:

As you mentioned, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. What happened with former CNN reporter Jim Acosta?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

The difference between that case and this case is Acosta was an individual reporter, and Trump didn't like the way he posed his questions. So he revoked his credentials, but not CNN as a whole, and not CNN and other reputable media organizations. 

What happened with Acosta and what's happening now is viewpoint discrimination, which is prohibited by the First Amendment. When the government designates a forum, such as the press room, such as Air Force One, when they invite members of the public — and when I say public, I mean press when I say press, I mean public, I don't make a distinction there. But when they open up an area for public discussion or public listening, they cannot discriminate based upon who they like to deal with. They’ve got to open it up to everyone. 

Melanie Plenda:

Have other presidents tried to ban media outlets?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

I don’t believe any president — at least since 1914, when the White House Correspondents Association was cared — no. No president has tried to ban an organization. Richard Nixon tried to ban the Washington Post from parts of the White House during the Watergate investigations, but aside from that, from my knowledge, this is unprecedented in terms of what the current administration is doing and trying to do.

Melanie Plenda:

You mentioned viewpoint discrimination, let’s talk about that.

Gregory V. Sullivan:

In the law, we have a concept called forums — public forums and non-public forums. The traditional, quintessential public forum are our parks. Boston has the Boston Common. Virtually every city and town in the country has their park or their common. Speakers at those locations are only subject to restrictions that relate to time, place and manner. In other words, you can't use a loud amplifier at 2 o'clock in the morning in a residential area. The government can employ time, place and manner restrictions if they're reasonable, but viewpoint discrimination in a public forum, no. 

Then there's what's called a limited, or a designated, public forum, and that's what we have in the White House. They've designated an area, the press room, in the White House, for members of the press who are credentialed, as opposed to Joe Citizen walking in, armed or unarmed.

But once you let organizations in, you can limit them based on space availability. For example, a reasonable place and manner restriction, but not because of the way they report the news. That's just totally violative of the First Amendment. We, the people, have a right to hear various views and opinions. We see in the news coverage that not every organization plays a story or reports a story the same way, and that's fine. That's what we call the marketplace of ideas, but for the government to say, "I like this organization, I like the way they report what I'm doing, but I don't like this one, so keep them out”. That's just not allowed under our Bill of Rights, i.e. the First Amendment. 

Melanie Plenda:

How does a case like this affect media access to government officials? What does it mean for local journalists or the average citizen?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

We all rely on certain news outlets because not every news outlet, not every local publisher, has access to mass media. Reliable wire services, reliable press organizations are where we get our news, whether we are local reporters or we are the average citizen.

Local publishers cannot cover worldwide and national stories the way organizations such as the AP can. So the news filters down, and fortunately, because of the internet, it filters down with rapidity these days, and we rely on it. Whether you're watching Fox News or whether you're watching CNN, you're at least getting some perspective on current events, and that's critical. 

Melanie Plenda:

Do journalists and citizens have protection at the state level for access to public officials?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

Absolutely. It's the same concept that we've been talking about. I say often that the rights to free speech and free press are eviscerated, absent the corresponding right to know what the government is up to. Here in New Hampshire, because of our constitution and because of our right-to-know law, we are able to know what the government is up to. And when government officials don't respect that we have people who want to know what the government is up to, we have the courts. And I've been obviously impressed with the Supreme Court of New Hampshire in the past 20 years versus in previous years. We've really expanded the sunlight that is shown on governmental action because of the decisions of the N.H. Supreme Court. 

Melanie Plenda:

Is there a better solution to protecting access to public officials? Besides duking it out in court, is there a legislative solution or something else that would make this issue easier to resolve?

Gregory V. Sullivan:

The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and by the constitutions of the various 50 states — but particularly New Hampshire, which has very strong constitutional provisions — should be enough. Government officials need to understand what the role of the press is and what the role of the First Amendment is with respect to their conduct, and we're just not seeing it from the current federal administration. Unfortunately, yes, it takes court orders these days to guarantee those rights. 

There's a judge in Boston named William Young, who the New England First Amendment Coalition recently recognized for his work in ordering the president of the United States, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the government agencies to abide by the law. It's a decision where, unfortunately, the young woman who was a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., was detained by ICE for months wrongfully, and ultimately she chose to leave the United States. 

She's a bright young woman who wanted to flourish in her career here, but because of the actions of the federal government, she's now back in Turkey. And Judge Young wrote a tremendous decision, just pointing out the fact that the government in that case acted terribly with respect to that woman's civil rights, her right to free speech. Citizens and non-citizens alike, if they're here in the country lawfully — which she was — enjoy the same free speech rights, he ruled. That case has been appealed by the government.  

MelaniePlenda:

So interesting, thank you Greg.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Transparent NH: How communities respond to receiving right-to-know requests

The Granite State News Collaborative, the Concord Monitor, Muck Rock and Sunlight Research teamed up for a project to see how accessible New Hampshire’s public records are. The series is called Transparent NH. Across 23 communities, and 46 agencies, 280 public records requests were submitted. What were the results? Here to talk about that are two local journalists spearheading the project, the Concord Monitor’s Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Van Fleet and reporter Sruthi Gopalakrishnan.

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Melanie Plenda:

Jon, tell us about the series. How did it start? How long did it take? What did it involve?

Jonathan Van Fleet:

Well, it started when you, Melanie, came to me and said, "I have an idea for a project,” and I said, "I'm happy to help.” Where it began was an idea to get a comparative understanding of how different towns deal with our right-to-know law, and we started having a few meetings with the Sunlight Research Group, who then, throughout the course of the project, became MuckRock, and it started more than a year ago. I think we first had our conversations in June or July of 2025, and we first had to figure out what we wanted to ask, then we had to figure out who we're asking, and then we had to figure out how this could be of use to the news organizations in New Hampshire, and especially the people of New Hampshire. That's the groundwork that got us from beginning to then the real legwork of getting the requests sent out, answered, and then reporting on them. 

Melanie Plenda:

Jon, why test public records accessibility? Can you explain to the audience why this is important and not just for journalists?

Jonathan Van Fleet:

The story mentioned this, but really, if you boil it down, the government exists to serve the people. Everything that the government does is at the behest of the people. The power of the government comes from the people. So when you really boil it down, the government should have very, very few secrets. When people want to know what their government is up to, which they are funding, and which is existing to serve, then there should be as few barriers as possible, which is why the state's right-to-know law says the greatest possible access to the actions and records of government. We can't underscore those words enough “greatest possible.” 

So when you actually carry that out and you ask government agencies for these records and they put up all these barriers, you find yourself asking, is this the greatest possible access that they can give the public? And in a lot of cases, it's not. So that's what we found through the project, and we'll get to some of that. But the state Constitution, even before the right-to-know law was passed, which was initially passed in New Hampshire I think it was 1967, but the right to open government was enshrined in the state Constitution, so this isn't a new concept. This is fundamental to the state of New Hampshire and how the government serves the people. 

Melanie Plenda:

Sruthi, what was it like working on this series? I imagine you had to juggle other stories as well while working on all this.

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

This was a yearlong project, and we did break this up into bite-sized pieces. Jon and I met with the team at MuckRock every week, figuring out what needs to be done that week. So it was better for us to just break it up into small pieces, and that actually gave me time to work on my other stories as well. If you ask me, what jumped out at me at first is how each town or community responds differently to every single request. We would file the same request with each town, and they would respond completely differently. 

Melanie Plenda:

As you both were working on this series, did anything surprise you about the results, or in some cases, the lack thereof? 

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

One thing that was very evident is a lot of the communities did not know if they should be responding to a request that came from out of state, and since MuckRock is not really based in New Hampshire, we had a lot of calls and emails. Sometimes some of the communities that I knew felt that email was not used in the right way. So we had to have a lot of conversations with them about that as well. Some were willing to give us the request if we just email them, but some wanted us to come in person and make sure that we are a New Hampshire resident before giving us a request. So they were really confused about the law when it came to out-of-state requests. 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

There was that, as Sruthi was saying, the variety of responses to the identical requests was a little surprising. As Sruthi said, it was it was enlightening in some ways, but I guess what I would say is, for the most part, communicating with the local officials, what I learned is they are willing to help. They just needed a little nudge. They needed to know that their time was well spent and that they were doing something that wasn't just frivolous. And I think we got there.

Melanie Plenda:

Were there any creative denials? Or just different versions of the word no? Let’s start with Jon.

Jonathan Van Fleet:

A couple of my favorites were the city of Nashua. When we asked for the one month of emails for the Board of Aldermen president, who is Lori Wilshire, the city of Nashua said that a person is not a public agency, and so therefore you are not entitled to any emails. This is considered closed. We appealed, and we said obviously this is a public official, doing public business, with a city email account, but they never budged, and their score reflected that. But it was unique in the denials that we got. This is something that was handled routinely by other communities. Not everyone liked us asking for their emails, but we got them. 

The other was the Manchester School District had asked us to pay $855 for their emails, so they were going to give us the first 250 emails free, and everything else thereafter was going to be $1 per email. The law says electronic records should be provided electronically, but it also does allow for reasonable fees to be charged. We argued that those fees were unreasonable, especially because the law does not allow them to charge for staff time. But they felt that they were on solid footing, and they maintained that that was what we had to pay. But as you can see, if the regular member of the public had to pay almost $1,000 to figure out how the school district is corresponding with parents, this was about curriculum, you could see how that would be a barrier to access. 

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

I think those two were the weirdest ones for us. But I think when it came to evaluations, we did ask for police chief evaluations, school superintendent, as well as the city or town manager evaluations. We found that communities were more open to providing us police chief evaluations versus superintendent evaluations or the city or town manager. One reason that they kept telling us was that these are personnel records, and we felt that they were kind of unwilling to do the balancing test. So some communities, if we did talk to them and push a little, they were willing to give us. But some just rejected us when it came to those.

Melanie Plenda:

And Jon, what about the agencies that sent records? Were they complete?

Jonathan Van Fleet:

They were mostly complete. It's also interesting when you look at that. So when we asked for our school district emails, some of the communities just said, "Here's everything,” emails, and the back and forth between parents. It's very candid. There's kids' names in there. Other communities were like, "Oh, we have to black out, redact, everyone's email address, everyone's name,” and so the records become a little more obscure, you can kind of follow along.

But the level at which some of the communities just said, "Here you go.” The level at which they considered once it's a public record. So if I email my town, I expect that email and my email address to be public. It's part of the public record. The town does not need to redact my email address because I am generating a public record by communicating with my town. So they, in many cases, put on a different level of redaction. Student names, little different. I think they could argue that student names should be eliminated. But again, if the parent is the one who's generating the public record by emailing the school district, I think the folks that gave us the unredacted records were right. Obviously, I'm a staunch advocate for transparency, so I want as little redaction as possible. 

In other cases, we got some records and some inconsistent redactions, but overall, I feel like mostly we got what we asked for, and in some cases, communities said what we asked for they didn't have. That was also a bit of a head scratcher. Like some communities said, we don't have a police chief evaluation. So it's like, really, no one's ever evaluated the police chief. That's interesting, but for most of the project, we got what we asked for.

Melanie Plenda:

What did the two of you learn from working on this project so far? Let’s start with Sruthi, then to Jon.

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

I think my biggest takeaway is that a lot of communities are willing to work with you when you file a right-to-know request, and sometimes they don't even want you to file a right to know request — just walk in, ask us if you want a particular record, which is easier for us. We are here in the customer service business, so I feel like most communities, especially the town administrators, are very open to providing requests, which was a big surprise for me. 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

Yeah, I mean there was a lot to learn. What I learned is just that the variations of the way people looked at the law was surprising to me. And as Sruthi was saying, being able to communicate with folks directly made a really big difference. When you're responding to an email, you can be a little terse. You can, as a person getting that email, you can read tone into it, and when you actually talk to a lot of these folks on the phone and explain what we're looking for, and I did that in Portsmouth, they were kind of asking themselves, why shouldn't we do this? And when I explained it to them, they said, “OK.” I also learned that when the communities found out they were being compared to other communities, they kind of perked up a little bit because no one wanted to be the worst.

Melanie Plenda:

What do you hope the public takes away, or learns from the series? 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

I hope that they learn. It's easy to say the government should do this, the government should do that, but the relationship between government and the people is inclined. So that's what I really want the public to understand is that the government doesn't exist to rule over them. It's the other way around. If you think about town meetings, the people are why the government exists, and that fundamental relationship that they have a right to know. That's what I hope the public understands.

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan:

I think I would just echo what Jon said, the resident public should feel like they can reach out to their town officials and find whatever information they need, and also feel comfortable filing right-to-know requests because they pay for the town officials, they pay for the government.

Melanie Plenda:

Jon, where are we in the series? What’s coming next and when? 

Jonathan Van Fleet:

What we didn't do is a great job of writing about what's in the records. What we actually wrote about is what we asked for and why, and then the responses. So you got a real surface-level view of the project and how it worked, but we didn't dive into what we actually got. That's the next phase of this reporting, which should be happening over the next six months. Sruthi will be writing about how towns are using AI policies. Catherine McLaughlin will be writing about the disparity of who is answering the superintendent, police chief, town manager evaluation questions. Why is it so different in these communities? We're going to look at those school emails; there's a lot of stuff in there. So I think people will be interested to see what's in some of these.

Melanie Plenda:

Well, congratulations on the series. Great work! Looking forward to seeing more. 

The State We’re in a weekly digital public affairs show is produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members.

Invisible Walls: The collaborative look at the Seacoast

Today, Portsmouth is a haven for expensive homes, luxury condos and high-class hotels. Go back a few decades, and the city looked very different. It was more diverse, more affordable and perhaps more rough around the edges. What happened?
The Granite State News Collaborative, in conjunction with Seacoast Online and the Portsmouth Herald, is in the midst of a series of stories called “Invisible Walls: Seacoast.” It explores how exclusionary zoning laws, urban renewal, and gentrification have created systemic, unseen barriers to affordable housing and socioeconomic diversity in Portsmouth. Here to talk about the series and its findings is one of the primary editors, Jeff Feingold, who works with the Granite State News Collaborative. 

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Melanie Plenda:

Jeff, tell us a bit about the series. For those who aren’t familiar, this all started with a similar project in Manchester. What are the highlights in that series? 

Jeff Feingold:

The original Invisible Walls series took a really long, comprehensive look at how Manchester's exclusionary zoning laws have reinforced poverty and impacted so many aspects of life in the city. It focused on one area in the city in particular; they call it the center city. It's where there's a lot of multifamily buildings, a lot of which I would say are not exactly in the best shape. Some of them are in poor condition. They're owned by negligent or absentee landlords, but they do have 4-5-6 apartments in each building. 

It turns out that, because of the city's zoning — and it also goes back before they even had zoning to the 19th century — created this area where housing options were more affordable. That's where historically, since the 19th century, that's where the newest residents of the city reside. Going back to the Irish, French Canadians, and Greeks in the ’20s, zoning in particular was created to actually restrict people to those areas because of a process called redlining. Manchester was the only city in northern New England to go through redlining, and it just made this place where the poorest people are living. 

Melanie Plenda:

Tell us about the Portsmouth project, what did that entail? 

Jeff Feingold:

The series is not just about Portsmouth. It's also about the other cities on the Seacoast as well — Dover, Rochester and Somersworth. But we're kicking off the series with Portsmouth because that is by far the most expensive city to live on the Seacoast, and probably is statewide. 

Portsmouth is such an important economic engine for the entire area. It's home to hundreds of employers, some of them very very large, as well as two major industries — hospitality and retail — that employ a lot of people. So we've discovered that over the years the city has become far less affordable than it was, let's say 20 or even 10 years ago. As property values rise, lower and middle-class people who have lived there for generations can no longer live there.

The result has been they have to move farther away, which is why we're looking at Dover, Rochester, Somersworth, and other communities in between, because they want to look for affordable housing, and there's very little in Portsmouth. The thing is that we found also that, because of the housing costs up in Portsmouth, they've gone up across the whole Seacoast. So there are people who maybe move from Portsmouth to Dover, then they move from Dover to Rochester or whatever. The problem of affordable housing has many ramifications that people don't always think about. 

Melanie Plenda:

For those who aren’t familiar, what do you mean by zoning? What is that?

Jeff Feingold:

Zoning are rules developed by city officials, the City Council or Selectmen, who vote on these things. They want to control what kind of buildings, housing, or businesses can be in certain areas. So you see that in any larger community in the state. 

There's a lot of times that what they've done is they've built an area where there's just retail, or industrial parks, or only single-family housing, which is pretty dominant in most communities in New Hampshire. What they have done over the years is say they don't want multifamily built housing in many parts of our city or its community, and that’s because they think that means they'll bring more people in. People believe in the myth that, because you have more people, you'll have more families, you'll have more kids going to school, and it raises property tax, but that's been proved to be completely untrue. 

Melanie Plenda:

Can you give us an overview? What are some of the key findings of the project? 

Jeff Feingold:

We talked about the zoning. We've also found that what's happened is that we've seen really interesting changes in commuting patterns. How people have moved, because we actually specifically look at the Seacoast bus line, because Seacoast does has one of the better public transportation systems in the state. Not saying that much, but it is one of the better ones. 

We found people who work in Portsmouth, especially in the retail and hospitality industries, which are among the lowest-paid jobs there are. They can't afford to live in Portsmouth, so they're moving farther and farther away, and we found people who are commuting from Rochester and Somersworth who go down to Portsmouth for their jobs. They can't afford to live in the city, and some people we found have moved from Portsmouth.

Melanie Plenda:

So what about Portsmouth and the surrounding area today? Should people just accept it becoming a wealthy enclave? Are there solutions to making it more affordable again?

Jeff Feingold:

I think that they are really working on solutions. They're trying to change the zoning. They're trying to allow more multifamily housing in the city. But the problem is so difficult that it's going to take a long time. They have taken some good first steps, but advocates are saying you need to do more. We need to allow residential areas where right now they're restricted to lots; you could allow much more housing on one acre than one single-family house, and you should really be opening up those areas to multifamily housing as well. 

Melanie Plenda:

Where are we at in the series as of this Friday and what happens next?

Jeff Feingold:

We've done the stories on urban renewal and on just the overview of what's going on the Seacoast. The next story is going to be about these city workers who can't afford to live in the city, and what that means. We have the police chief saying it's hard for him to recruit police officers. Coming up will be the look at zoning, and then we have the look at the commuting patterns. That story is coming out pretty soon. 

One of the other aspects of this that we found is really interesting is manufactured housing and mobile homes. They're very expensive, and that's a place where people historically could go to get cheaper housing. They're being priced out because of various factors, including private equity companies owning mobile home parks.

Melanie Plenda:

Interesting as always! Thanks, Jeff.

The State We’re In, a weekly digital public affairs show, is produced by NH PBS and the Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communications. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members.

The primary election is over, so what’s next?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

In New Hampshire’s Sept. 8 primary election, there were some surprises, perhaps, though not many. So what do the results mean, and what’s next for voters? Here to talk about the results are Anna Brown, executive director of Citizens Count, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters about the political process, and John Lappie, associate professor of political science at Plymouth State University. 

Melanie Plenda:

The New Hampshire primary results: Were there any surprises there?

Anna Brown: 

We really did see the moderates, the well-known names, prevail in New Hampshire — and this was true up and down the ballot. So, for example, if we're looking at State House races, there were some moderates who were facing challenges from the right, and there were some that were facing challenges from the left, and generally the moderates came out on top.

When you're looking at the top of the ticket, we didn't see what we've seen in other states in terms of progressive or socialist candidates beating incumbents, or certainly more moderate, well-known candidates.

John Lappie:

We saw the more well-known candidates, the more moderate candidates, winning this election. Anybody who's been watching YouTube recently and seen all their videos interrupted by Chris Pappas or John Sununu ads knows they moved on to the general election like a month ago. They knew they had won their primaries. The only real closely contested ones were the 1st C.D. primaries. Those were more closely contested, but there was a big late shift to Anthony DiLorenzo. The polling had that race pretty close with a large number of undecided, and he wound up winning by a fairly large margin.  But that's not really all that uncommon in Congressional primaries that are usually pretty-low profile, compared to a Senate or gubernatorial primary. Voters often don't know much and don't make decisions until the last week of the campaign when they learn more about the candidates.

Melanie Plenda:

People are closely watching races across the country for the U.S. House as well as the Senate. How are things looking nationally as we head to November? Will we see the so-called blue wave?

John Lappie:

There's certainly potential for a blue wave. There is a lot of uncertainty right now over how effective Republican gerrymandering efforts were over the course of this year to try to limit Democratic gains.

It'll be very hard for the Republicans to maintain the House because they only have a three-seat majority. You don't need that much of a swing towards the Democrats, even with the gerrymandering, to result in a Democratic majority. The question is going to be: If there is a Democratic majority, how big is it going to be, and can they flip the Senate? There's a lot of seemingly winnable states this cycle, but in those states, it’s very easy to get close to winning and very hard to get that last 2 to 3% over to actually winning. Democrats have been plagued by that before. So I think that's going to be the big question: Can they get over the hump in the Senate?

Anna Brown:

I think that yes, economically, it's going to swing in Democrats' favor. Because if people are angry at what they're paying at the pump and they're angry about what they're paying for groceries, they may associate that with the Republicans that they voted in two years ago.

That being said, I think it's going to be important for Democrats to not just sort of run on how much people are angry with Republicans, because the approval rating for the Democratic candidates is also very low at the national level. As I said, I think if you talk to anyone from either party, I don't think most people in the United States are giving a thumbs up to anything happening in Washington D.C. right now, so I would agree with John. Polls are hard. Maybe there will be a blue wave, but I think it's going to be more of a squeaker than people might expect.

Melanie Plenda:

Do you have any sense about the issues that matter to voters, and what they may be thinking for the general election? First to Anna, then John.

Anna Brown:

The pocketbook — what you're seeing at the pump, what you're seeing at the grocery with your grocery bills. Also potentially, what people are seeing with their healthcare bills. I think that that is maybe something Democrats could see some movement on. I feel like health insurance is one of those issues where - I don't know if it gets people to the polls, but certainly Stefany Shaheen seems to be really making that the focus of her campaign in New Hampshire. So we're going to find out if that resonates with voters.

John Lappie:

The economy is definitely the number one issue, just like it was two years ago, three years ago or four years ago. It's the cost of living, and neither party is necessarily popular right now, but the Republicans have the disadvantage of being the incumbents, and I think with the president's tariff policies and the war in Iran and gas prices, it essentially made the president own the state of the economy in the minds of a lot of voters. Not necessarily that they think better of Democrats now, — polling definitely doesn't bear that out. But it is much harder for Republicans. When you make major changes to economic policy, and you have a war in the Middle East that everybody knows will lead to higher gasoline prices, then it's a lot harder to avoid blame for the state of the economy.

Melanie Plenda:

What other predictions or thoughts do you have about the election heading into November?

John Lappie:

This is going to be, again, a close race, and we'll have to wind up seeing what happens. For me, the big question is the polling. It has gotten very hard. Response rates are so low that I could easily see that the polls are missing Republicans again, and they're actually doing better than we think. But pollsters maybe have overcorrected to try and pick up Republican voters, and now they're underestimating Democrats, and the Democrats are going to win by even more than we expect. So, to borrow from meteorology, the cone of uncertainty has just gotten so much larger in our elections the last decade or so. 

Anna Brown:

I hate being wrong, so if you don't predict who's going to win, then you're never wrong.

I will say what I'm most politically nerdy about is actually seeing what happens on the ballot vote that's going to come up just in New Hampshire. Every town is going to vote on whether there should be a tax cap for your local school district. This is typically something that would happen in local elections in the spring, but Republicans passed the bill, and Governor Ayotte signed it. So it's going to be on the ballot this November.

This has sort of been the Republican response to voters lamenting their high property taxes. They've said, "OK, then you have to change it at the local level because we don't want more state funding funneling down. We don't want to raise your tax rates overall.”

Thus far, attempts to impose those caps at the local level have not really been successful. We've seen voters say, "No, we want to give our schools the full budget. We don't want to have a cap.” So I think that that's kind of the political nerd question for me: What is that going to look like? Because that school-funding issue is huge at the state level, and will probably influence a lot of votes for state representative and state senator. 

Melanie Plenda:

Anna, what resources will Citizens Count have for voters as we head into the November election?

Anna Brown:

Please come to our website, www.citizenscount.org We offer profiles for every candidate for state rep on up. We search for websites, Facebook email addresses, survey everyone so that they can say their positions in their own words, and if they don't respond to the survey — although most do, thankfully — we will put out voting records, other public statements they have made, and so on. 

We also have information about your polling location, how to register to vote, if you need it. And I always encourage everyone: if you are ever concerned about where to vote or how to vote, call your town clerk. Local elections are where it's at in New Hampshire. That's where all the magic happens. We aren't run at the state level. It's not some nationalized process, and every local official I have encountered wants you to participate. 

Melanie Plenda:

And we’ll link to that in our show notes. Thank you, John and Anna.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

How Citizens Count helps prepare Granite Staters before elections

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

New Hampshire’s election season is here. Offices from U.S. senate to state representative are up for grabs. Here to talk about the primary election and where to get information about the candidates is Anna Brown, the Executive Director of Citizens Count, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters about the political process. 

Rosemary Ford:

The state primary is on Tuesday. Lots of high-stakes races this year. Let’s start with one of the more exciting races: U.S. Senate. Jeanne Shaheen is not running for re-election, leaving a wide-open field. Let’s start with the Democrats. Who’s running? Who looks like they might win?

Anna Brown:

Chris Pappas, the current representative for District One for Congress in New Hampshire, is running for the U.S. Senate, and thus far he has been the favorite to win the Democratic primary. He has a long political history in New Hampshire. He served on the Executive Council before he went to Washington. His family has a well-known Manchester restaurant, the Puritan Backroom. But he does face a challenge from Karishma Manzur, who is running a campaign to the left of Chris Pappas, for example, challenging him on issues related to Israel and foreign policy.

She's definitely a more left-leaning progressive candidate, and she's gained some momentum in recent weeks. Polls are showing that she is gaining that name recognition. That was really a big uphill battle against someone like Chris Pappas. So I still think Chris Pappas is going to win the primary, but I think that we are going to see a surprising turnout for Karishma Manzur, and we'll have to see how Pappas navigates that moving towards the general election, attracting those farther-left voters as well as the moderates that are usually his strong voting base. 

Rosemary Ford:

What about the Republicans? Some recognizable names there too. Who’s looking good there? 

Anna Brown:

We have John E. Sununu, who used to serve New Hampshire in Washington a couple decades ago. He is the brother of former Gov. Chris Sununu and the son of another former governor, John H. Sununu. He is running a campaign endorsed by President Donald Trump, despite criticizing Trump in the past.

He was sort of the early favorite to win, and he's still the favorite to win. But he's being challenged by Scott Brown. Scott Brown, funny enough — even though he did not get the Trump endorsement — does have the support of some farther-right Republicans in New Hampshire who see him as less part of quote “the deep state” as sort of an alternative candidate, more independent thinker. 

So the Scott Brown/John Sununu primary, as I said, is probably going to go to Sununu. Things got a little interesting this week when Sununu turned down a WMUR debate with Scott Brown and said that he'd done enough public conversations with Scott Brown. So he got a little heat for that, but he's definitely started focusing on the general election and Chris Pappas as opposed to this primary. 

Rosemary Ford:

When folks head to the polls, they will also be choosing folks for state rep and state Senate. Can you explain the importance of these roles for our audience? What do they do?

Anna Brown:

In New Hampshire, the governor is actually a very weak office. The governor doesn’t have a line-item veto. She can only sign or veto the bills that come to her. It's really up to the Legislature when we're talking about setting the state budget, deciding on school funding, spending on the roads you're driving on. So it’s much of what happens to you on a day-to-day basis that's related to the government is really driven by the House and the Senate. In fact, Governor Ayotte did veto quite a few bills this year, and then the Legislature overrode several of those vetoes. 

These are the elections that I really encourage voters to pay attention to. There's so much noise about the national level — and I'm not saying that's not important, but these state races, as I said, are really going to impact you

Rosemary Ford:

Are there any state rep or state Senate races that you are following?

Anna Brown:

First of all, there are some state representative primaries in the Lakes Region that I think are very interesting.

The Lakes Region overall saw a lot of population growth during COVID-19 and has moved to the left during the same time. It’s more open to Democrats, perhaps. There's also a really interesting movement to support independent and moderate candidates around the Gunstock Mountain issue, which is sort of this local controversy about wanting to privatize that, and there was some criticism that this was a Free Stater sort of action, and that really rallied moderates.

Now there are some moderate Republicans in office who are having primary challenges from more conservative, more Trump-oriented Republicans. If those more conservative, Trump-oriented Republicans win, they may be facing a harder win in the general election. Democrats may have more of an opening there, whereas if the moderate Republicans win the primary, they may be more likely to hold on those seats. So that Lakes region in general is really open to some political change, and I'm going to be watching that. 

I'm also watching races around Manchester. We saw in recent election cycles a definite move towards the Republican Party in Manchester. That was true with the mayoral race and with the state Senate race. Now for some state senators in Manchester, we have primaries on both sides. So I'm definitely going to be curious to see who is victorious there, and we're looking at voter turnout. 

Rosemary Ford:

What about uncontested races for state rep and state senate? How many are there?

Anna Brown:

The interesting thing is in the House and Senate, contested races are more rare in the primary than uncontested. Usually, it's actually really hard for parties to recruit enough candidates to fill every seat on the ballot. There are plenty of districts in New Hampshire where one party or another wasn't able to fill the full slate of candidates. So that's another reason why these contested primaries can be so notable, because it means there's that much interest, and overall, there were a lot fewer candidates who stepped up to run at the state level than in the past few election cycles. 

I think we can speculate about a lot of different reasons for that. I know that a lot of us are really frustrated by the tone in politics. I can see why people wouldn't want to step up. I think there's also conversations between the two parties about how they support or don't support local candidates. But definitely, even if there is a blank space on your ballot, don't rule out the chance for there to be a write-in campaign, because I have also seen in New Hampshire candidates get just enough write-ins that they end up on the general election ballot after the primary. So your vote really does count in New Hampshire. It's often decided at that state level by a dozen or fewer votes — so definitely make sure to learn who's on your ballot and get to the polls. 

Rosemary Ford:

Tell us about the work Citizens Count has been doing to keep voters informed about the candidates. 

Anna Brown:

Citizens Count creates a profile for every candidate who appears on the ballot at that state level — for your state representative, your executive councilor, state Senate, governor, all these races we've talked about. Then we send a survey to every single candidate. We follow up by phone, by email, and I tell them, “We don't endorse. Whatever you want to put on that profile page, however you want to answer these questions. If you want to tell us you hate our questions and you’d rather we ask something else. We'll put it on the page.” We truly just want to make it that one-stop shop for voters to see where their candidates stand.

We've had over half of candidates respond to us. Those that haven't, that are in office, we still have their full voting records. We've tried to fill in as much as we can, so please do take advantage of our website. We want this to be a resource for both candidates and voters to connect. 

Rosemary Ford:

Thank you Anna, interesting as always. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Hiking safety: How to be prepared when the days get shorter and colder

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity. 

The N.H. Fish and Game Department does an average of 180 search-and-rescue missions a year, rescuing ill-prepared or injured hikers. On Aug. 14, Fish and Game rescued four New Jersey teens — who were underprepared for their hiking adventure — from Franconia Ridge in the White Mountains. As we move into the fall, it’s important to be aware of how hiking safety can change as the days get shorter and colder. Here to discuss that is N.H. Fish and Game’s chief of law enforcement, Col. Kevin Jordan. 

Melanie Plenda:

To start, can you tell us more about what happened during that rescue in Franconia? 

Kevin Jordan:

We received a call late in the evening on Aug. 14. The weather at the time of the call had really deteriorated through the day. We had higher winds, and the temperature had dropped a bit. We received a call from four young individuals from New Jersey that were above treeline on a Franconia Ridge trail, and they were experiencing difficulties coming down.

The initial report said there was a hiker struggling to breathe. That changed to an injured lower leg, which later would change to they really were above their skill levels and unprepared, and so we made the decision based on the weather conditions and the fact that they were unprepared to initiate a search for them, to go and get them, and bring them down. 

Melanie Plenda:

What does the rescue process typically look like?

Kevin Jordan:

The N.H. Fish and Game Department has 48 officers statewide. On any given day, probably half of those are off, so we've reduced our field force to about 20 to 25. The trails in the White Mountains are known as some of the most challenging parts of the entire trail system, and they present all kinds of physical and weather challenges because of the height of our mountains and the exposure to the weather.

When you do a typical carryout under those conditions, you are going to need 16 to 20 people. So if Fish and Game were delegated to be the only agency doing this, we would not be able to succeed — it would be very difficult for us to do that. We rely a lot on what I call “professional volunteers.” These are groups of hikers who have decided that they want to contribute to the hiking community, so they have expended time training with us. They're part of five different teams located strategically throughout the state. Those teams are well-prepared. They have good hiking equipment. They train with us on a regular basis. We reach out to them for these search missions.

Now when we do that, what a lot of people don't realize is that there is a risk every time they leave the trailhead. Those risks include things like falling, injuring themselves — volunteers can take one wrong step and be out of work for eight weeks with no salaries. They're going above tree lines, above 4,000 feet in the dark, in usually adverse weather conditions, so anything can happen. That is something that we take very seriously, so we take careful consideration when we get these calls to make sure that risk is worthy of the call. And in this case, people were put at great risk for something that, really in my opinion, could easily have been avoided. 

Melanie Plenda:

What are the most common scenarios Fish and Game receives when getting calls for search and rescue?

Kevin Jordan:

The two things that lead the calls for us are unpreparedness — believe it or not, people without flashlights or headlamps are the majority of our calls. I don't know what I’ve got to do to get people to carry a flashlight. It's one of our 10 essentials in the Hike Safe Card program. We promote it publicly every chance we get. I think the thought process is “I'm not going to be out overnight, so I'm not going to bring a light.” In my job, I have never left the roadway without some sort of light source, because you just don't know if you're going to be caught out longer or it's going to take longer, or you're going to come across an injured hiker that you're going to want to help, and you're going to need that light later in the night.  Clothing is probably second to that — being cold because they don't have proper gear with them. 

We also get a lot of injuries. We get a lot of really prepared, good hikers, experienced hikers who fall and twist an ankle. You're on brutal terrain, and you're out there when it's wet and slippery, and people fall and twist their knees. So I would say injury and unpreparedness, unpreparedness leading the charge, injury running a close second. 

Melanie Plenda:

Can you tell us more about the Hike Safe program? What benefits does this voluntary card give Granite Staters?

Kevin Jordan:

Years ago, we created it in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, a Hike Safe program. We put together public information that we could promote to try and avoid some of these scenarios by listing the 10 essentials that should be included in a backpack, safe ways to hike, and things to avoid while hiking. That program was established back in early 2000, and we started campaigning on that, putting that out to the public in hopes that people would pick up some tips from that and hike in a more safe manner.

Fast-forward, as hiking calls increased, the fund to pay for these rescues wasn’t sufficient.  For years and years and years, our only search and rescue fund was $1 from every OHRV, ATV and snow machines. One dollar from each one of those would go into a search and rescue account. The fee was created in 1989 and has never gone up a dime — I’d like you to tell me anything else you know of that hasn't increased since 1989, but that never did. 

So, beginning 15 years ago, I was frustrated. I didn't feel that it was fair. Our sportsmen and women were paying almost 100 percent of the cost of search and rescue. Hikers and climbers were paying nothing. So I began going to the Legislature, repeatedly asking for a more equitable way to fund search and rescue. I felt, and still feel today, the best way to do that is from general funds, tax dollars. The state is benefiting from these folks. They're buying meals, they're buying gasoline, they're staying in hotels, and the state has a responsibility, I feel, to make sure these people make it home safely on Sunday night, and I think we should pay for that. The legislature agrees with me to this day, but there's always been a reluctance and an inability, I guess, in their minds to find that funding. 

In 2014 and ’15, a couple of things happened. One was that the Hike Safe card was created to help fund search and rescue. We kept the fees as reasonable as we could — $25 a year for an individual and $35 for a family. It gives a hiker an opportunity to contribute to the search-and-rescue fund. It also would be kind of an insurance card so that they wouldn’t be billed for a rescue — the law still says if they’re incredibly reckless, they do something extreme, they will still be billed — but to this day, we’ve never billed anyone with a Hike Safe card or a license.  It’s been highly successful. The first year, we sold $75,000 worth; the past year, we sold $445,000 worth of Hike Safe cards. It has really been very helpful. 

Melanie Plenda:

Any final advice on how hikers can be prepared for their hiking adventures this fall? 

Kevin Jordan:

I've done this for 36 years, and I don't know of a time in New Hampshire's history where we have had more information available on how to do this and do it safely, right down to the very trail that you would be considering. I can promise you, there's a guide to guide you on how difficult it is, how far it goes, things you should watch out for, and how to prepare. Our weather apps are superior to anything that we ever had 15 years ago. So you can get accurate, in-the-moment, weather. We use it all the time when we come and get you.

All this information is available. You don't need to go into a hiking store and spend thousands of dollars. We're talking about a $5 two- battery flashlight with an extra set of batteries. We're talking about stuff that you probably have in your closet — a nylon rain jacket to go over a fleece vest, No cotton — wearing clothes that are not going to soak up the water. Just spending a little bit of time and a little research to prepare. You can do this. People do it all the time, year-round. It can be done very safely. Just respect it. 

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you, Kevin, for joining us today. Visit hikesafe.com to learn more about hiking safety. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Why do local property taxes make up the lion’s share of N.H. education funding?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew
This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Property taxes pay for a lot of important things in New Hampshire, in particular public education. New research from the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute estimates that Granite State property taxpayers pay 72% of the dollars spent on public schools. Why do they carry the majority of this cost, and what can be done to change that? Madeline Randall discusses how public education is funded in New Hampshire, as well as some of the new laws impacting education, with Ben Reynolds, senior policy analyst at the Fiscal Policy Institute, and Anna Brown, the executive director at Citizens Count.

Madeline Randall:

To start us off, can you tell us how education funding is calculated in New Hampshire.

Ben Reynolds:

About $4.15 billion in total revenue goes toward public schools for education. The revenue comes from various sources, but the three main areas come from local sources, state sources and federal sources.

With that, one of the main state sources is its “adequate education aid,” which is about $1.06 billion. The term “adequate education aid” is how the state defines its term for education aid that was set by the state Supreme Court's Claremont decisions in the 1990s. For that state adequate education aid, the state starts off by looking at the number of pupils that live within a community, it sets a base rate amount per pupil for that. The state also looks at those student characteristics as well as other community characteristics to help with determining the aid, and then sends that money directly to local governments.

Madeline Randall:

What role do property taxes play? And how can that vary from town to town?

Anna Brown:

In addition to that per-pupil adequate funding that Ben talked about, local property taxes are a significant part of school budgets, so it is up to each municipality to decide how much they want to add to that state per-pupil amount for their schools. That's most of what you're talking about when you're seeing your local property tax bills. So there's a local decision-making process that goes into it, which is unrelated to the state property tax rate, which is set across the state.

Madeline Randall:

Ben, tell us about your recent research concerning education funding. What were some of the main findings?

Ben Reynolds:

One of the main things that we saw was that property taxes made up about 72% of revenue for local public schools during the 2024-25 school year. Really only about $700 million of that $4.5 billion comes from state revenue sources that aren't property taxes that are raised and retained locally. We also saw that the state’s share of total education funding has been declining over the last decade and that school costs have been increasing over the automatic 2% annual increase in the state's education funding formula.

Madeline Randall:

Let's talk a little bit about legislation. What happened in the last legislative session?

Anna Brown:

There are two big bills that are directly related to this. The first, House Bill 1563, created a three-tier structure for reimbursement for special education. We haven't talked about that yet in the school-funding formula, but the state does provide some more money per-pupil based on special education needs, if they're English language learners, if they're eligible for free or reduced lunch, and so on.  The state tweaked that special education reimbursement formula — that is important insofar as some of those increasing school costs are coming from more students needing special education. 

But particularly relevant to our conversation today is HB 1300. That bill in this upcoming general election and also in 2028 is going to have every municipality vote on a tax cap that would limit local school budgets. So this — as I said, it's already up to localities to decide how much more they're going to be raising beyond that per-pupil amount from the state — but this would usually get voted on as an option during the town meeting season in the spring. By putting it on the general election ballot, Republicans in the House and Senate are hoping, “OK, this will be a chance for more of the public to weigh in to say that we really want to limit local school budgets.” It remains to be seen if that is going to unfold – or if, as happened at many local meetings in the spring, voters continue to say, "No, this is what our schools need. We're not going to put a tax cap in place.”

Madeline Randall:

Why is New Hampshire ranked last in the nation for how much the state contributes to public education funding? 

Ben Reynolds:

Looking at the amount of state revenue that goes towards the total revenue for public education — of the total $4.15 billion spent, the state's contribution is $1.06 billion. In other states, that ratio is kind of flipped, where it's a little more of a state contribution than local. But when you also look at it at a dollar basis per-pupil, the rankings do change a bit. 

Overall, for looking at both local and state revenue of dollars per-pupil that go toward education, New Hampshire is ranked ninth. When you only look at local revenue dollars per-pupil for public education, New Hampshire actually goes up to fourth. When you pull it only for state revenue per pupil,, then we go down to 34th. So that percentage of the state revenue contribution, as well as the state dollars per pupil, New Hampshire on a state level is a bit lower than other states in terms of funding public education. 

,Anna Brown:

I would just add that in addition to inflation, some particular areas that are really driving increased costs are health insurance costs for school employees, special education, and in fact the state prorates some of that reimbursement for special education. Prorate means that it's not going to give 100% of what theoretically it might. But this also is worth mentioning as part of a historical tradition in New Hampshire of local control, for better or worse. 

Many legislators will argue that it is up to localities to decide how much they really want to fund their schools or not, and so some people see it as a virtue that there's very little state input, and that it's mostly on local taxpayers to raise the funds and make the decisions. That being said, there's also a lot of debate around the fact that some towns have much wealthier residents who have higher property values so it's easier for them to contribute more to schools, whereas property-poor towns end up with a much higher property tax rate to extract the same amount of tax revenue from their property owners. So there are questions of equity in the system.

Madeline Randall:

Do you think this could change in the future?

Anna Brown:

The first thing that I will say is New Hampshire, compared to many other states, has a shoestring budget, and as I mentioned, this is a bit of a choice. There's a lot of use of and reliance on nonprofits for other services that in other states would just be paid for by the government. This also means that a lot of these costs are falling on municipalities instead of at the state level. 

For this to change, I think that we would have to see one of two things happen. First, I think there would have to be a new revenue source to come in. And since Republicans in New Hampshire have made very clear that they are anti just about any form of new tax, any form of new revenue — with very limited exceptions — that would mean Democrats taking the House, the Senate and the governor's office. That would be an uphill battle. We could have a whole other conversation about that, but certainly a sweep of all three would be hard to do.
We do then have to look and ask what's going to happen next in the state Supreme Court. It's been ruling on the issue of school funding for decades now, and we haven't seen major moves in the distribution between states and localities. If anything, it continues to really fall in the localities.

At this point, we know that the state is actually seeking to overturn the Claremont decisions that are the foundation of a lot of the rulings that do put more onus on the state to fund education. So, I think that if you have a complete sweep and a change of party control, maybe you get a new revenue source. It is also possible that future rulings from the Supreme Court could really push the Legislature to provide more state funding. But if anything, it seems like the winds at the court are swinging in the opposite direction.

Ben Reynolds:

I think it's important, if you want to kind of equalize this ratio between the state and local contributions, for the state to provide more money. The state really limits how local governments are able to raise revenues — they are pretty much only able to raise revenues through local property taxes. This really limits local officials from finding ways to come up with additional revenues when costs are increasing.

We did see in the last budget cycle that the state faced some resource limitations, partially because of past decisions to reduce state tax revenue. The final repeal of the interest and dividends tax took effect in the last budget cycle. We also saw that there were higher costs to maintain existing services. So if the state, in this upcoming budget cycle, wanted to provide more money to local governments, then they're going to have to take a look at tax revenues, and the existing services that they want to fund as well.

Madeline Randall:

What would be your advice to Granite Staters who would like to see the state make education funding a higher priority?

Anna Brown:

There are many examples that I can point to in New Hampshire where legislators have been swayed by interactions with individual voters at public hearings, at community meetings, from one-on-one emails, and so at Citizens Count, we really do always encourage folks to be connected with their legislators. 

Our advocacy toolkit on our website has some tips — for example, how to attend a public hearing, how to write a letter to a legislator — and I would say it's really important to highlight the personal stories and personal impacts that you are seeing in your life, because — even though we love the work of the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute and it's so important to have that real data — it's also true that legislators are human, and they're going to connect with those stories a lot. 

I think that we also need to be ready to have a complex conversation. There's no easy silver-bullet solution to how education, let alone education funding, has been changing and is going to continue to change. So I think that we need to be working on bipartisan relationships and willingness to dig into this very sticky problem.

Ben Reynolds:

I think it's also important for Granite Staters to understand how much New Hampshire relies disproportionately on local property tax bases to fund all kinds of public services. Depending on how they can get state aid for public education, that could significantly reduce the upward pressure of local property taxes for other aid. The state could also provide more aid for roads and bridges, for public safety or for water and wastewater infrastructure, and those would also decrease the upward pressure as well.

Madeline Randall:

Thank you Anna and Ben for joining us today. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Tradition disrupted: How does the Democratic Party’s presidential primary decision affect N.H.?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Since 1920, New Hampshire has held the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, a tradition even written into state law. But that law and tradition were disrupted in 2024, when the Democratic National Committee decided to hold its first primary elsewhere, and it will likely be disrupted again in 2028. What does that mean for New Hampshire voters and upcoming elections? Discussing that are New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan and John Lappie, associate professor of political science at Plymouth State University. 

Rosemary Ford:

John, to start us off, what’s the history behind New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary?

John Lappie:

The first-in-the-nation primary happened more or less by accident.

In the 19th century and into the 20th century the presidential candidates were usually picked by state party leaders at a convention, and there wasn't really any participation by ordinary voters in the process. Primaries for president were democratizing reforms that began in the early 20th century, and even by the 1960s, only a couple of dozen states had primaries. But New Hampshire was an early adopter.

Our first primary was held in 1916. We became first in the nation in 1920 by accident, the Legislature decided they wanted to save money and increase participation in the primary, so they moved it to coincide with the town meeting. It was a way to save money, but of course, over time, as primaries became more common, and especially to 1952, when candidate names were actually added to the ballot in our primary instead of voters just voting for delegates representing a candidate, it became very influential.

Rosemary Ford:

David, what kind of impact do you think having the first primary has on the state and its voters? 

David Scanlan:

It's not so much on the state as the rest of the country. The thing about the New Hampshire primary is that it has always been for the average voter. Back when the New Hampshire primary law was first written by a state representative from Richmond, N.H., named Stephen Bullock who was a farmer who felt that the nominations for president should be decided by the citizens and not party bosses in the back room. That principle holds true today.

So, New Hampshire has had this process where, because we were first, the candidates come here. The voters have a longstanding tradition and culture of kicking the tires of the individuals that want to be president. They have a long history of not being afraid to ask difficult questions and putting the candidates through the moves that they need to become president. 

We've often heard from candidates themselves that have participated in the presidential primary that the primary made them better candidates. It has taught them how to talk to the average voter, what issues are important. In the end, New Hampshire voters may not select who ends up being the nominee, but they certainly do a great job of picking candidates who would make great presidents.

Rosemary Ford:

On July 24th, the Democratic National Committee voted for South Carolina to be the first state to hold its primary election in 2028. How does that affect New Hampshire?

David Scanlan:

New Hampshire and its primary results are unpredictable. The national party does not like that, especially when they may have a favored candidate that they think has the best chance of winning in the general election. But New Hampshire takes its role very importantly. It's a longstanding tradition that we did not take from anyone; it just began here, and we ended up being first by default. We have grown very strong roots from that point to the present time, and the service that we provide to the rest of the country in that regard is very important. 

It's an easy state to campaign in. There are very few barriers to getting on the ballot. It's a small state geographically and population-wise. An unknown candidate without name recognition or a lot of money can come to New Hampshire and campaign and do really well here, and they can finish in the top three. It certainly creates a foundation for becoming the nominee.

It really comes down to a different philosophy. New Hampshire's is, “Look, we're willing to vet the candidates. We've done a good job.” The candidate that comes out of New Hampshire is the choice of the people that live and vote in this state, and it is not going to be the selection of the party elites moving forward.

If you remember when the DNC began this nominating process they had a set of criteria to determine those states that would make early primary states — efficiency, rigorousness of scheduling, and things like that. New Hampshire literally checked all the boxes in that regard. What happened on the 24th was it came down to a debate, really on ethnicity. Should a state like South Carolina, which has a predominantly black population, go before a state that has a predominantly Hispanic population, like Nevada? 

Those two states were actually fighting with each other over that. It seems like the original criteria that New Hampshire did well in was just simply tossed out the window. Because of that, New Hampshire is going to fight for its traditional place on the calendar.

Rosemary Ford:

On July 22nd, the UNH Survey Center released findings that tracked Granite Staters’ opinions on prospective candidates for the 2028 primary election. Of course, we don’t know who’s running yet, but, according to their study, U.S. Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the favored Democrat candidate and Vice President J.D. Vance was the preferred Republican candidate. How accurate are polls like these in predicting outcomes for elections, especially this early?

John Lappie:

Polls are a snapshot in time, and those results match what people are thinking about right now. It's a long time until primary season, so the results will almost certainly look very different from what we're seeing in the polls right now. 

That being said, I think we can glean something out of it based on how high-profile or low-profile the candidates are already. If you're U.S. Sen. John Ossoff, Democrat from Georgia, I'm not too disheartened by polling 2% in New Hampshire because most people don’t know who he is yet. He has a chance for growth. If I'm somebody like former Vice President Kamala Harris, and I see that I'm not polling well in New Hampshire, that's a lot more concerning, because everybody already knows who you are, and that would suggest there's not that much appetite for her candidacy.

Rosemary Ford:

How are things going for this year’s mid-terms elections? Will voters notice anything different?

David Scanlan:

There are going to be some subtle but new changes in the polling places. There has been almost a complete transition from the old electronic ballot counting devices that used optical scan technology to two new devices now that use digital scan technology. We expect that they will operate better with fewer breakdowns because they will store an image of every single ballot and that will make post-election auditing a lot easier and a lot more accurate. 

There are some real benefits to this changeover. More and more polling places now are using electronic poll books for voters to check in. So a voter can show at the polls, have their photo ID scanned, voter information will pop up on the screen because the checklist is loaded into the devices before the election. Voters will be able to get in the shortest line – they won't have to get in the line where the letter of the alphabet that begins with their name always seems to be the longest. 

The real benefit is at the end of the night when it's time to close the polls — simply a stroke of the keyboard will give instant results on the number of voters that checked in, which party's ballot they took, and that information can then be uploaded into the statewide voter database, so it will be more accurate. 

Then we have a new accessible voting system in place for individuals with disabilities that is more user-friendly. There are also tighter requirements for voters now. Voters that are registering for the first time will have to show documentation of identity, age, domicile and citizenship. With citizenship, if a voter attests that they do not have their citizenship documentation, then they can sign an affidavit to prove that qualification.

ID requirements also have changed, especially for college students. College IDs now are no longer an acceptable form of ID, so students will have to show a driver's license either in the state of New Hampshire or the state that they lived in before or while they're attending school. So those are changes that voters should be aware of, and if they have any questions on the requirements, then they should reach out to my office or the local clerk's office in the town that they are living in while they're going to college.

Rosemary Ford:

John, what are your thoughts on the midterms, both here in New Hampshire and across the country?

John Lappie:

It could still change, but this is around the time of the year, especially Labor Day, when people start paying more attention to the general election. The overall environment is favorable to the Democrats. That matters more at the level of the U.S. House, where people usually don't know quite as much about the candidates.

I think they usually know more in a state like New Hampshire, where we only have two House members. But if you're talking about a state with dozens of House members, like Florida, New York, California, they tend to get lost in the shuffle. In those places people saying, "Well, I'm upset with this party, so I'm going to vote for the other party” —  that matters a lot more.

I like to say that New Hampshire is a true purple state. We've seen this over the governorships of Sinunu and Governor Ayotte — they're winning elections as Republicans. Republicans winning the state Legislature, even as Democrats have won the federal offices. Lots of people voted for Kamala Harris and Kelly Ayotte, or Joe Biden and Chris Sununu. That used to be very common across the U.S. but is still very common in New Hampshire.

Rosemary Ford:

Thank you both for joining us today. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Cyclospora: What can N.H. residents do to protect themselves during the current outbreak?

On this episode of “The State We’re In,” State Epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan of the N.H. Division of Public Health talks about cyclospora, the infectious parasite that’s been involved in a massive national outbreak that so far includes dozens of cases in New Hampshire.

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Melanie Plenda: 

For those who have missed the recent news reports, can you tell us what cyclospora is and why people are concerned?

Benjamin Chan: 

Cyclospora is an intestinal protozoan parasite. It’s not something that’s usually life-threatening, but it causes profuse, watery diarrhea. It can also cause things like abdominal cramping, loss of appetite. People can have nausea and vomiting, although perhaps the vomiting part is less prominent than with other types of intestinal infections. Most people with a normal healthy immune system will get better on their own over time, but they can have prolonged symptoms. 

If somebody thinks they might’ve been exposed to cyclospora and has on-going symptoms of watery diarrhea, for example, there is testing that can be done, and that testing can be important to identify an infection. There are treatments, antibiotics that can be given, that can help lessen the severity, shorten the duration of illness. 

This is, unfortunately, a relatively common infection that occurs this time of year. It’s spread through contaminated water and fresh produce. Usually what we say is that it’s spread through the “fecal-oral” route. That means it’s spread when somebody has cyclospora in their stool, and that stool contaminates water, and that water is used to irrigate crops in another state or another country and then the contamination then gets on the fresh produce. Then, when it gets shipped to somebody and they eat it, they can become infected with cyclospora. This is how outbreaks happen, and historically, this is a parasite that is known to cause outbreaks. 

We've had cyclospora outbreaks in berries and lettuce, cilantro and other fresh produce in the past. We’re seeing a very large increase in cyclospora infections nationally, this year — that’s what people are hearing about in the news. Thousands of cases identified in other states like Michigan and Ohio have led to a recall of lettuce. That lettuce [identified at the start of these cyclospora outbreaks] has come from a certain area of central Mexico and been distributed nationwide to many other states across the country, including New Hampshire. 

Melanie Plenda: 

Can we talk a little bit about how New Hampshire has been impacted by this? 

Benjamin Chan: 

Cyclospora is a reportable disease, meaning that if a provider or a laboratory diagnoses somebody with cyclospora, it gets automatically reported to the Division of Public Health so we can investigate, try and get some idea about whether there could be an outbreak — for example, related to contaminated food that might need to be recalled. 

We’ve been watching what’s been happening at a national level, and every year, typically, in New Hampshire, we have fewer than 10 people diagnosed with cyclospora. Currently in New Hampshire, and these numbers are on our website, we have a total of nearly 80 people so far, in 2026, that have been diagnosed with cyclosporiasis.  

Melanie Plenda: 

Do you have a sense of why it’s different this year rather than previous years? 

Benjamin Chan: 

It’s not entirely clear what’s different this year. We do know that this is an organism that can lead to large outbreaks, and we don’t always have a good picture of what’s happening at a national level.

The national outbreak was first recognized when another state identified a large increase in cyclospora infections that were being reported to the state health department. They investigated, as most states do across the country, and they identified that a majority of people being reported to them ate at Taco Bell. That led to a nationwide recall. That’s sort of how this initially has played out. 

As more and more attention and awareness has come to this outbreak, that has led to more testing. Factored into this is the idea that probably every year people get cyclospora infections — they develop symptoms, they don’t seek testing because it’s not regularly ordered, or routinely available, and they get better on their own, so they’re never tested, never identified. But in the setting of a large national outbreak, where we’ve done messaging to the public and to healthcare providers, it raises awareness of the fact that there was this outbreak. 

The more testing you do, the more people are identifying the infection, and more testing leads to more infections that are identified and then reported to public health so that they can be investigated. I think there’s going to be more information coming in the next days and weeks  around potentially other sources of contamination. But again, this is an organism that we know causes outbreaks, and this is the time of year when we would expect to see outbreaks. The numbers we are seeing are much, much larger than historically what we’ve seen in the past.  

Melanie Plenda: 

What should people do? Should they be avoiding all lettuce or fresh produce? How can they handle this?

Benjamin Chan:

I think there are a number of steps that people can take to protect themselves if they’re concerned about cyclospora.

It’s generally recommended that people wash their fresh berries and fresh produce to the extent possible. If people are concerned that a vegetable might be contaminated they can cook it — cooking will kill the cyclospora parasite. Also they should make sure that they have good handwashing, make sure there’s not cross-contamination happening in the kitchen — between cutting boards, washing the counters, washing the utensils. 

The other steps that people can take is just to be aware of where their fresh produce is coming from. There are, this time of year, lots of different farmers markets, particularly in New Hampshire, that are selling locally grown, fresh produce. There are companies and businesses out there that, regarding lettuce, grow lettuce in greenhouses, with much lower risk of contamination. There are products that are out there that people can take advantage of that are either locally grown or grown in ways that reduce or minimize the contamination, particularly for lettuce.

We still recommend and generally promote people to eat fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, but there are steps people can take to make sure they’re minimizing the risk for food-borne infections.

Melanie Plenda:

I want to thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Chan. All great information. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Attention and prevention: Staying on top of the risks from tick and mosquito bites

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

No one likes getting bitten by ticks and mosquitoes. Hopefully, it’s just painful and annoying, but sometimes these pests can cause health impacts that can be concerning. State Epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan, who helps prevent and control the spread of disease and promote the health of Granite State residents, discusses what the concerns are and what we should do about them.

Melanie Plenda:

Anecdotally, how is this season for ticks and mosquitoes? What do you know about their prevalence?

Benjamin Chan:

I think maybe it would be helpful to start by saying that the health department generally tracks infections and disease. We don't routinely track some of the vectors, or the insects like ticks and mosquitoes, that can spread that disease.

There are a few ways that we can assess how active a season we're having with ticks and mosquitoes. One certainly is by how common some of these diseases are that we're tracking, like Lyme disease for ticks and West Nile virus for mosquitoes. But there are other sources of information. Mosquito trapping occurs in certain areas of the state. We also can assess and have data coming in about emergency room visits for tick bites. 

I think generally what we're seeing, at least early in the season, is a very active tick bite season. There were a higher number of emergency department visits for tick bites in March and April than maybe we've seen in the last couple of years, but that largely has evened out, and the trend we're seeing now is more in line with what we've seen in past years. 

Regarding mosquito season, it varies year to year, depending on weather conditions — how much rain we're getting. I don't believe that we're having a more active mosquito season than we typically see, but some of our community partners, like our towns and cities, and some of the companies that do mosquito trapping in these local towns would have a better idea. 

Melanie Plenda:

To put a little bit of context around the prevalence of Lyme disease, last year there were about 1,800 cases. This year it's around 1,500 or 1,600. Not that people shouldn't be careful or aware of the disease, but how prevalent is a tick? How common is it for someone to get Lyme disease if they get bitten by a tick? Do you have a sense of that, or is there a way to quantify that?

Benjamin Chan:

It's a great question, and actually, there's not a great way to quantify the risk from any single tick bite. What I can say is that New Hampshire, including the rest of New England in general, is a high-incidence state for Lyme disease, meaning Lyme disease is found commonly in people and in ticks in our region. 

I think we go back to the idea of prevention — how do people stay healthy this time of year? How do people prevent getting infected with some of these pathogens? It comes back to preventing tick bites and preventing mosquito bites. There’s a variety of ways that people can do that. With some of these infections, there are treatments – antibiotics that can be given to treat an infection. So, if for whatever reason prevention fails, somebody gets bitten by a tick and they develop Lyme disease, there are antibiotics and treatments that can be given to cure the infection.

That's not the case with all of these pathogens, particularly the viruses. Powassan virus that's transmitted through tick bites and Eastern equine encephalitis, West Nile virus and Jamestown Canyon virus that are transmitted through mosquito bites are viruses for which there are no specific treatments. There are no antibiotics or antiviral medications that work, so somebody is medically supported until their body can clear the infection on their own.

Melanie Plenda:

Generally, what symptoms should people look for with tick and mosquito bites? When should they head to a health provider versus head to the pharmacy? 

Benjamin Chan:

I will point to a couple of different times when somebody should talk to their healthcare provider. The first is if somebody has severe or prolonged symptoms, the symptoms of a lot of these types of infections are not specific; fever, fatigue, maybe a mild headache, some muscle aches. They are all very common symptoms. If somebody is developing severe symptoms — severe headache and neck pain to the point where it hurts to move their neck, or family or friends are noticing the person is confused, or they're having other concerning neurologic symptoms like seizures or changes in their mentation and cognition — those are all warning signs for more severe invasive types of infections.

People should phone their healthcare provider or even go into the emergency department if they display any of those types of more concerning symptoms. The other time is if symptoms just aren't going away — prolonged fever, prolonged headache, other concerning symptoms people may be having that aren't going away — then they should be talking with their healthcare provider.

The other time when someone might want to be on the phone with a provider is if they have a tick bite and the tick has been attached for a prolonged period of time. There is a prophylactic or preventive antibiotic called doxycycline that can be given as a single dose that can prevent Lyme disease.

Now, the tick has to be attached for a certain amount of time in order for the Lyme disease bacteria to spread from the tick into the person, so that doesn't happen right away with Lyme disease. But if somebody, for example, finds an engorged or enlarged tick on themselves, it's probably been there for more than 24 hours. They can talk to their healthcare provider and get a single-dose prescription for an antibiotic that can help reduce the chances of coming down with Lyme disease. 

Melanie Plenda:

What should you do if you find a tick on you? Should you bring it somewhere to be tested?

Benjamin Chan:

Generally, we don't recommend tick testing. There are places that do that that are out there, but as a general medical recommendation, testing a tick doesn't necessarily change how somebody is treated — that's sort of a core tenet, if you will. Whenever we're talking about medical recommendations, does an intervention change how you treat the patient? And in this case, taking a tick and testing it doesn't necessarily change what happens with a person who's bitten by a tick.

Melanie Plenda:

Are there other insects of concern when it comes to health impacts?

Benjamin Chan:

It's a good question. Primarily, what we're concerned about in New Hampshire is really around ticks and mosquitoes. But I think maybe it's also a good opportunity to highlight the fact that this is a time of year when people might be traveling.

So when people travel, they should be aware of the risks in the areas that they're traveling to. While ticks and mosquitoes are the primary concern here in New Hampshire — particularly around these diseases that we've been talking about — there may be insects in other locations of the U.S. or of the world, where different types of infections can be transmitted through fleas. There also might be other types of infections that are transmitted through tick bites or mosquito bites that aren't present in New Hampshire. 

If people are thinking about traveling, particularly if they're traveling internationally. Generally, it's a good idea to be talking with a travel medicine clinic to see if there's certain precautions people should be taking to see if there are vaccines to prevent diseases while people are traveling.

Melanie Plenda:

What should we do going forward, in terms of prevention?

Benjamin Chan:

Some of these infections have antibiotic treatments, some of these infections have no specific treatments, particularly against some of the viruses that are transmitted through ticks and mosquitoes. 

A lot of this comes back to preventing the tick bite or preventing the mosquito bite in the first place as the best way to prevent infection and stay healthy. I also mentioned there are no specific vaccines for people to prevent these types of infections either. It really comes down to preventing tick bites and preventing mosquito bites, and there are a number of ways to do that. 

First, there’s avoiding habitats where ticks might be present. Ticks like to hang out in sort of borderline or transitional-type habitats where maybe you have shrubs and tall grasses, so avoiding going into those types of habitats can prevent tick bites. 

Mosquitoes are most active at dawn and dusk, so to minimize the risk of mosquito bites, people can avoid going outdoors at times of the day when mosquitoes are most active around dawn and dusk.

Then, if people are outdoors or in areas where there might be ticks or mosquitoes, applying an insect repellent to exposed skin that's effective against ticks and mosquitoes is important. A lot of people know of DEET-based repellents. Some people don't like using DEET, and that's fine. There are other options out there — more natural options, like lemon or eucalyptus-based insect repellents.

There are a number of other steps people can take. There are certain types of insecticide sprays that can be put on clothing, like permethrin-based sprays, that can help repel ticks and mosquitoes. It's important to do tick checks when coming inside after being outdoors, both on yourself and also your pets and your gear.

As for mosquitoes, one way of minimizing them around one's home is to make sure that there's no standing water — buckets or pails or wheelbarrows or old tires that have standing water in them — because mosquitoes like to breed in even small amounts of standing water. We generally recommend people walk around and make sure that there aren't pails holding water in one's yard as a way to try and reduce mosquito populations around someone's home.

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Chan.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

What tools do New Hampshire farmers use to keep pests away from crops?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article is edited for length and clarity.

Our fruits and vegetables are constantly under watch for signs of an army of tiny invaders. How do we protect our produce from tiny insect interlopers? Dr. Amber Vinchesi-Vahl, who works at the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, discusses how agricultural pests are monitored and how growers are being helped to find solutions for dealing with them. 

Melanie Plenda:

What work do you do at UNH?

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

In addition to being the state extension specialist in entomology and integrated pest management, or IPM, I am also the state IPM coordinator, and we use all kinds of techniques to control insects beyond just chemical management.

Melanie Plenda:

What agricultural pests are you currently monitoring for?

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

I run the state trapping program, which is funded by the N.H. Department of Agriculture, Markets, and Foods. We're trapping for many vegetable pests, mainly sweet corn pests. We trap four different moths that affect sweet corn — it's actually the caterpillar that's causing the damage to the crop, not the moth. But we use pheromone traps to track those moths to figure out when they're arriving and what kind of pressure we have, because many of our sweet corn pests do not spend the winter in New Hampshire. They migrate north on storm fronts and wind events and jet streams. So knowing when they arrive is really important for management. 

We do have some pests that overwinter here or are native. So the European corn borer is one of our sweet corn pests that does spend the winter here. The other two that migrate up are the corn earworm and the fall armyworm. We also trap for squash vine borer, which is a native squash pest to New Hampshire. Then we also trap for a couple of invasive species: the spotted wing drosophila and the brown marmorated stink bug. We also have a tree fruit trapping program that's run by my colleague Jeremy Delisle out of Merrimack County, but I kind of run this vegetable program. 

Melanie Plenda:

What is the next step once you trap them? 

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

One of the key tenets of integrated pest management is monitoring first, because then you're only implementing your controls when you know you have the pests present, and it's at actually damaging levels. We use trap thresholds to inform our growers and recommend when they should implement controls.

The thresholds are basically the amount of pests in the trap that indicate you will need to implement management to avoid economic damage. The pests may be present, but they might not be at levels where you actually need to do any management. This helps reduce pesticide inputs and pesticide costs, and saves labor, time and money for the growers as well.

Melanie Plenda:

As you mentioned, some of these are native problems, and some are invasive ones. Can you explain what that means, and why the invasive ones can cause extra headaches?

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

A native pest is an insect that's always been here. It's native to the United States, native to New Hampshire, New England area, and that's our squash vine borer, which is a pest of squash. It's a day flying moth, and they lay their eggs at the base of the stem, and when the larvae hatch, they bore into the stem, and as they grow, they can cause the plant to collapse. 

Invasive insects are insects that are introduced from other areas of the world into the United States. They're usually not introduced with any of their predators from their native range, and they have plenty of habitat and resources once they arrive in a new place and can really take off. Invasive insects also tend to make integrated pest management a lot more difficult because they arrive, they grow exponentially, and growers have to do something to control them, and that’s usually relying on pesticide sprays until we can kind of come up with other management strategies to work with the sprays. 

We also have a lot of insects in New Hampshire that we wouldn't really consider invasive anymore, but they're also not native to New Hampshire, like the European corn borer. It is not native to New Hampshire, but it's been here for a very long time. So has the Japanese beetle, but technically they're not native to New Hampshire. 

Melanie Plenda:

Is climate change a factor here with these pests?

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

Yes, we're really noticing these shifts within our 20 years of our trapping program. We've really been able to track when the migrating pests arrive and how that changes depending on storm events and hurricanes. In the past, we used to really only see corn earworm and fall armyworm late in the season, but now sometimes we see big spikes in late July. Other things we're noticing is the unpredictable weather in the spring, with more storms maybe bringing some of our pests up sooner than we normally see them. 

Insect development is really temperature-dependent. So when we have warmer weather, they're able to cycle through their generations faster. So we may have faster population buildup. They're showing up earlier and lasting longer into the fall because it's staying warmer longer as well. Also, some of the invasive insects that generally come up from the south may now be able to spend the winter here if we don't get a lot of snow cover or it stays warmer over the winter, which means they're showing up earlier in the spring.

Melanie Plenda:

What kind of economic impact do these insects have when they attack crops?

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

We really have great data that shows that growers are able to save a lot of money by reducing their pesticide costs. In 2025, our trapping network showed that our growers saved, on average, about three sprays in the season for sweet corn, which equates to almost $70,000 for labor, fuel and pesticide costs. They also reported increased yield, almost a 10% increase in yield than what they thought they would have had if they were not controlling. 

The three sprays saved are based on using integrated pest management compared to the historic way that the pests were controlled, which was calendar-based sprays. Basically that would mean that when they thought the pest showed up, they just started spraying on a calendar basis, whether the pest was there or not. Using this trapping first is really important. They're able to target the insects more efficiently and then increase their yield.

Our growers also reported that if they were not managing for these pests, they would have had over a 50% loss. 

Melanie Plenda:

You mentioned spraying and pesticides. Is that something consumers should be concerned about? And if so, what questions should they ask? 

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

This is a great question. It's a little tricky to answer, but pesticides have a lot of rules to them. Growers aren't just out there spraying whatever they want, whenever they want. Also, all pesticides have a pre-harvest interval, or PHI, and that means that if the PHI is seven days, the grower cannot spray it within seven days of harvest — that's for safety to harvest crews, to you-pick consumers, to the grower, and that's going to make it safer. There's no residue there, but you should always wash your produce as well, but there are residue laws in the United States for pesticides. Growers are being very conscious about the way they apply pesticides.

Melanie Plenda:

Are organic pesticides less worrisome than inorganic or chemical ones? Why or why not? 

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

Organic pesticides are generally softer chemistries, and some conventional growers will use softer chemistries or more selective chemistries. That's what we call pesticides that are really only targeting specific insect pests rather than a broad spectrum, which may be killing your beneficials as well. 

Organic pesticides are still pesticides. Many of them still have labels that have to be followed, but they are derived from natural products rather than synthetic, which makes them different from your conventional pesticides. But some of them still have pre-harvest intervals. There's also a big push and increase in biological chemicals. This would be fungus or bacteria that can be applied to attack the insect pest, or even minerals like oils that you can apply that are a little bit safer as well.

Melanie Plenda:

You also mentioned pest management that doesn’t involve any kind of pesticide. Can you tell us more about those strategies? How effective are they?

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

Those are cultural practices. We kind of loop everything in IPM into a couple of categories. So the cultural practices are really just your production agronomic practices that many growers are already doing, like crop rotation. This is really important for disease and insect pest management.

For example, say I had cucumbers in a field in 2025. I'm going to plant something completely unrelated to cucumbers in 2026 to avoid those pests that probably spent the winter or are still in that area where I had the cucumbers, because then it's going to be harder when those insects emerge in the spring to find where I did plant the cucumbers, because now it's tomatoes there and they don't like tomatoes. You’re really trying to rotate through those crop groups to reduce your pest pressure. 

Other things include manipulating your planting dates. So if any home gardeners or farmers have issues with the Colorado potato beetle, which is a big fat red beetle that eats potatoes and tomatoes. By planting in July, you're going to miss that first peak when the adults come out of overwintering and come into your tomatoes and potatoes and eggplant crops. So manipulating planting dates is something growers can do.

Other cultural control practices include planting resistant varieties for disease pest management, if they're available. And there’s site selection — trying to find areas that don't have a lot of weeds, because weeds will harbor diseases and insects. 

For mechanical and physical controls, those are kind of barriers to pest entry. Many of our farms will put row cover or insect-exclusion netting over newly planted crops, and that's going to mean that any of the beetles trying to come in or other pests can't get there. 

Melanie Plenda:

Just to sum up, how are New Hampshire crops looking this year? And what can we expect to see at our farm stands?

Amber Vinchesi-Vahl:

I've been to a lot of farms this summer. Crops look really great. We're seeing some of our common pest issues a little worse this year than others, but that's pretty common every year. There's always something that kind of wins out. Onion thrips are a big issue this year on a lot of our onions, but those are close to harvest, so the bulbs are looking good. Sweet corn looks really good. We've had kind of a slow start to the sweet corn pests. We haven't really been trapping too many yet, so it might be like normal years where we see the big flush in August and September instead of mid-season like we are now.

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you for joining us today, Amber.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

El Niño 2026: What are New Hampshire’s weather conditions to come?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

The El Niño climate pattern is here. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, predicts that it has a 63% chance of increasing to a very strong intensity, meaning our own weather patterns could be due for a change. Mary Stampone, New Hampshire’s state climatologist and associate professor of geography at the University of New Hampshire, discusses what that means for New Hampshire.

Melanie Plenda:

First, what is El Niño is, and how does it work?

Mary Stampone:

El Niño is the warm phase of the Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It's characterized by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. It was first observed by fishermen off the coast of South America, who recognized its periodic occurrence right around the Christmas holiday and named it El Niño, or “little child,” in Spanish. Meteorologically, these warmer ocean temperatures are connected to air pressure and wind patterns across the equatorial ocean that have kind of a global ripple effect.

Melanie Plenda:

What is the global ripple effect?

Mary Stampone:

It can affect rainfall and temperature patterns all the way into North America, not just South America. It can impact monsoon patterns in Southeast Asia and also have an impact on the rainy seasons in equatorial Africa

Melanie Plenda:

How does NOAA predict the strength of El Niño?

Mary Stampone:

NOAA has a really extensive buoy network that monitors ocean and atmospheric conditions within those El Niño sectors of the Pacific Ocean. Then they aggregate this data into what's called an Oceanic Niño Index, or ONI. This accounts for the difference between the measured sea surface temperatures and the average for those areas within the Central Pacific. It's a three-month running average, and then when these values hit .5 degrees Celsius for five consecutive overlapping periods, then they classify it as being an El Niño. Then the strength is determined by how far above the average sea surface temperatures we are.

So we start with that week's El Niño at .5 degrees Celsius, but we can strengthen through moderate, strong and up to very strong phases for Oceanic Niño Indices over 2 degrees Celsius. Of course, the impacts from the El Niño tend to increase as the strength of the event increases. 

Melanie Plenda:

NOAA released an El Niño advisory on June 11, stating that there is a 63% chance that El Niño this year would be one of the largest El Niño events since 1950. What does this mean especially for the weather this summer? 

Mary Stampone:

El Niños do tend to be strongest during northern hemisphere winter months or cool seasons — and, true to form, this El Niño pattern isn't expected to peak until later this year, so it's still kind of ramping up, but  the impacts are usually strongest through October-November.

But in the summer, the stronger upper-level winds that are common during El Niños can suppress Atlantic hurricane development. So this is why we have a forecast for a less active hurricane season this year. Then. of course, in New England we actually tend to be more humid, and this is due to more tropical air coming into the region. With greater humidity comes greater precipitation, which could provide some beneficial rains as we recover from last summer's drought, but also increase the risk for flooding.

Melanie Plenda:

You mentioned October and later this year, so what about the weather this fall and winter?

Mary Stampone:

During the winter season is when the storm track dips further south during El Niño winters. This leads to pretty predictably wetter conditions across the South. We here in the North tend to be warmer than usual during the winter. It's important to know that every El Niño winter is a little bit different, especially in the Northeast, because we do have other patterns. We can still get some really cold air, especially January-February.

Melanie Plenda:

If El Niño does reach the predicted very strong intensity level, how would that impact New Hampshire specifically?

Mary Stampone:

Winters, again, across El Niños tend to be warmer than average across the northern U.S. Fun fact: the last time we were in a very strong El Niño was the 2015-2016 winter period, and that actually ranks as the second warmest winter here in New Hampshire. Second only to the winter of ’23-’24, which was a strong El Niño winter. 

So I think one of the things we can be fairly certain of is that it will probably be one of the warmer winters this year. Precipitation is really variable, sometimes that storm track stays to our south, so areas of the Mid-Atlantic - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania — get all of our snow instead of us. But depending on some other factors, that storm track could actually bring more new nor'easters to our region. Whether that translates into more snow will depend on temperatures. The amount of snow will depend on how warm we are. 

Melanie Plenda:

Does global warming have an impact on the intensity of El Niño? Should we expect El Niño to be more intense in coming years as the ocean temperatures rise?

Mary Stampone:

That's a fantastic question, and that is an area of active research, but what we do know is that global warming and the impact on warming sea surface temperatures can amplify the impacts of El Niño. So with the increased energy that's in the ocean water as well as in the atmosphere can amplify extreme weather events, especially heat waves and heavy rainfall. 

Melanie Plenda:

What are some of your other predictions for the summer's weather? 

Mary Stampone:

Overall, climate prediction center outlooks call for a warmer-than-average summer, which tends to be the case. We've had several warmer-than-average summers recently, but hopefully the outlooks for a potentially wetter summer, especially toward the end, for coastal New England will hold. That will lead to improved drought conditions for southern parts of the state.

We have already seen some improvements in the North Country, which has been fantastic. We still have some lingering severe drought in southern areas, but with greater humidity and hopefully some more precipitation. We look to have an improved, if not removed drought by the end of the summer. 

Melanie Plenda:

Do you have any advice for gardeners and farmers this year? 

Mary Stampone:

My advice is always to be prepared for drought — even if we're wet, still be prepared for drought. I think last summer was just a really good example of how quickly our conditions can change during the summer. We started out very wet last year, and then quickly, with a heat wave and an extended dry period, ended up with a flash drought that lasted through the winter. Do anything you can do to be more efficient with water — use less water-intensive plants and vegetation. Do those things that can make your property more resilient to drought, even if it's wet.

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you, Mary. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

New Hampshire 250: The Granite State’s role in America’s origin stories

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Communities across the Granite State are planning to observe the nation’s 250th birthday with all kinds of events and activities, many of them focused on New Hampshire’s role in the American Revolution. Mary Adams, the N.H. Historical Society’s homeschool program developer and museum educator, who has been travelling around the state with a presentation called “Redcoats and Rebels,” provides a historical perspective.

Melanie Plenda:

Not everyone knows that New Hampshire was the first colony to declare independence from Britain. How did that come about?

Mary Adams:

In January of 1776, we had a problem on our hands from the previous August. John Wentworth, the royal governor, had abandoned the colony. He was under increasing threat from the patriots of Portsmouth, who had wheeled a cannon up to his front door and threatened to blow the door off his house if he did not comply with them.

By August of 1775 he had moved to Fort William and Mary on Newcastle Island, and eventually sailed to Britain and abandoned the colony. So the provincial congress steps into this void, and they take matters into their own hands and create a new form of government.  They called it a constitution, but it looks very, very different from the constitution that we have today. There's no separation of powers, there's no checks and balances at all, and there's actually even no governor — there's just a legislative system and a judicial system.

Melanie Plenda:

The Pine Tree Riot happened years before the first official battle of the revolution — what was it and why was it so important.

Mary Adams:

It’s one of my favorite things to talk about, because it sounds a little quirky. It's a “fight over trees,” is how I've kind of heard other people describe it. But I think it gets down to the heart of what the revolution is really about. Who has the authority over these gigantic pine trees? Is it the king, thousands of miles away across the ocean? Or is it the people who live on the land, work the land, and need the trees for their own homes, bridges and their livelihoods?

Essentially what happened is the people in Goffstown and in Weare were fined because they had been cutting up the king's pine trees in their mills. In Goffstown, the people were compliant — they paid their fines, they got on with life. But in Weare, the people really refused to pay those fines. So in comes the sheriff to enforce the law, and the people take it into their own hands. They riot into the sheriff's room where he was staying, early in the morning, and they beat him. The intention was to beat him one lash for every tree for which they were being fined, and that was about 270 pine trees. So they beat him, they took him outside, and they put him on his horse — had also done some things to the horse, like they had cut its tail and cropped its ears to make it not sellable or desirable, and they send him riding out of town.

Of course, the end of this is that when they do finally go before a judge, one of those judges is Meshech Weare, who ends up becoming the president of New Hampshire eventually. But the fine is just so extraordinarily light that it really sends this message through the communities that it's not just the people of our local communities that are feeling this strength of rebellion, that it really is also being supported even in a small way from our leaders in New Hampshire as well.

Melanie Plenda:

Let’s talk about the Battle of Bunker Hill and the role of New Hampshire residents in that.

Mary Adams:

I love it because we think of it as a Massachusetts battle, but truly two-thirds of the soldiers that are fighting there are New Hampshire soldiers who have walked from New Hampshire.

I think of Isaac Wyman in Keene — we have his musket on display at the Historical Society. It’s the musket he carries from Keene down to Bunker Hill, and he's there along with about 1,000 other New Hampshire soldiers, many of them under the command of John Stark. The Massachusetts soldiers total about 500. They're also bringing down with them some gunpowder that they had raided from Fort William and Mary in December 1774, so they're adding to this fight in a huge way.

The Battle of Bunker Hill is so fascinating, it's this kind of first big mashup. It is such a surprise to the British. They know they have the upper hand with superior weaponry. So when they attack this left flank that John Stark and his men are behind, they are shocked because on the very first volley about 70 British soldiers were killed. The Americans repel them two more times, and finally John Stark decides it's time to exit the battlefield, but instead of his men just sort of abandoning the battlefield and running off, he has them very carefully, very methodically, leave, and they're providing covering fire for the rest of the battlefield as well.  This is where he loses 15 to 17 men in the fight.

This catches the eye of George Washington when he comes to visit the battlefield, and he hears about the battle and John Stark's decision not to just have his men willy-nilly abandon everything, but instead provide covering fire, and this is when he realizes that John Stark really needs to be in the Continental Army. 

Melanie Plenda:

Let’s talk more about Gen. John Stark — one of the most well known figures of the American Revolution. He coined the phrase “Live Free or Die.”: His story is kind of complicated.

Mary Adams:

He's born in New Hampshire, he's Scots-Irish — a group of people ll known for their resilience and hardworking spirit. John Stark ends up fighting with Rogers’ Rangers during the French and Indian War. It’s guerrilla-type warfare. They are not walking through an open field in straight, clean lines and bright clothing. They are hiding behind trees and stone walls, and they're circling around, attacking from behind.  So he ends up bringing all of this knowledge, this battlefield knowledge, when he arrives at Bunker Hill.

I think that what really resonates with so many people when they learn about John Stark is that he's actually not in the army for any kind of fame or fortune. He did not want to play the political game that was required of him to sort of maintain his rank and to achieve higher rank. He's really there because he just continues doing what he believes is the best thing to do. If something is not right, he is fair, he's honest, he's just, and he's going to try to right the wrongs, and so this is really so much of his heart behind fighting. 

There's an event that happens between his time in the Continental Army and the Battle of Bennington, which is when he comes back to New Hampshire. He's on a little bit of a respite trip, and he finds out that Enoch Poor, another man from New Hampshire, has been promoted above him to the rank of brigadier general, and this is pretty insulting to him, and he actually resigns from the Continental Army, and says that he will not answer to orders on the battlefield again from someone in the Continental Army.

But when the plea from Vermont comes, and they are asking for help — the British have sent British and Hessian soldiers to come to Bennington to raid storehouses, and there's this plea from Vermont to please help. So New Hampshire answers this call, and they call on John Stark. They give him the rank of brigadier general to command New Hampshire's militia.

Melanie Plenda:

On July 4th, the Historical Society will host an Independence Day open house. Can you tell us what visitors can expect?

Mary Adams:

You can expect short talks, crafts for kids, and there are guided tours. I'll point you to one of my favorite things in the building, which is that we actually have two of just 32 Revolutionary War flags left in the entire world. They're displayed on our grand staircase. They're remarkable for a few things. They are the only pair of flags left in the entire world from the Revolutionary War. As far as we knew in New Hampshire, the flags  had actually been burned with some boats in 1777. But in 1908, we got a letter saying they were hanging at Sandhurst, the military academy in Britain. It kind of sparks a series of events and we end up getting those flags purchased for us by our benefactor,  Edward Tuck, and they have been on display in our building ever since. 

Melanie Plenda:

For families and anyone looking to have an adventure this summer, the Historical Society is hosting the “603 History Hunt.” What is it and how can people participate?

Mary Adams:

I feel very attached to this event, because I have written all 200 clues. This event will be on an app. People can register, and then we give them all kinds of different things for them to do. So you can be celebrating a woman in Weare who heard that the British were coming,  so she made her kids eat all of their maple syrup products in one day because she didn't want the British to take them. You'll make a bowl of Count Rumford's soup, which saved Bavaria from a famine. There's an opportunity to take a hike to a remote New England glasswork site, which started in the 1780s but it's staffed by German POWs that were captured during the war. There's countless graveyards to explore, and tons of opportunities for selfies with different Revolutionary War heroes — so it's all going to be amazing fun.

Melanie Plenda:

Many  thanks to Mary Adams for this engaging conversation.  To learn more about New Hampshire in the American Revolution visit the NH Historical Society at nhhistory.org

To find Mary’s recorded New Hampshire History Minutes for NHPBS visit. To find a location for one of Mary’s upcoming “Redcoats and Rebels” presentations, visit nhhumanities.org

And New Hampshire Humanities, in partnership with NHPBS, is hosting “The Big Watch” in communities across the state where you can watch a short excerpt from “The American Revolution,” a new film directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, followed by a community discussion. Learn more at nhhumanities.org

Finally, there are a couple of online calendars available to help you find New Hampshire 250 events near you. One website is visit.gov/250th and newhampshire250.org/.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

State House wrap-up: A look at key bills that were under discussion in this year’s legislative session

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

The New Hampshire legislative session has ended. What bills passed? What didn’t? What comes next? Here to discuss what’s been going on in Concord is Anna Brown, executive director of Citizens Count, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters about the political process, as well as executive director of the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership and Public Service at the University of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce School of Law.

Melanie Plenda:

In broad strokes, can you tell us about some of the things the Legislature tackled this session?

Anna Brown:

There was definitely a trend related to social issues. So, for example, the CHARLIE Act, named for Charlie Kirk, sought to restrict how schools address gender, sexuality and race. Well, that bill was defeated. But the Legislature passed several other bills looking to revise anti-discrimination laws to allow segregation based on biological sex. Now, those have faced vetoes from Governor Ayotte so far, but there's still another one making its way to her desk as of the time that I'm speaking.

There were also lots of debates about spending, particularly local school spending. Early in the session, the House rejected a bill that would establish a statewide cap on how much local school districts can increase their budgets, but by the end of the session, the Legislature did pass a bill that would require every city and town to vote on a local tax cap in both 2026 and 2028, at the general election.

Melanie Plenda:

Let’s start drilling down on a few bills. One that came up is the business enterprise tax. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Anna Brown:

House Republicans originally wanted an outright cut to the business tax. They had come in on this issue, said it was in the mix, but they were in a bit of an uncertain budget situation, and decided to wait until the next budget cycle. They instead proposed raising the threshold before a small business has to pay those taxes. So the final compromise bill does raise that threshold, and it sets up a trigger for future business tax cuts if there is a very large revenue surplus. It's enough of a big surplus trigger that I'm thinking probably Governor Ayotte will sign this bill, but we'll have to wait and see.

Melanie Plenda:

The Legislature also tackled some housing bills to address the state’s shortage. How did those bills fare?

Anna Brown:

The legislative session started with a lot of proposals to actually repeal housing changes from last year. Those didn't move forward. Legislators really wanted to stick with that forward progress — getting rid of red tape and limiting zoning at the state level. So we saw some changes that were sort of clarifying or expanding on what passed last year.

For example, there's a bill that clarifies the law about residential development in commercial zones. Another bill makes clear that you can build an accessory dwelling unit in an existing nonconforming structure — meaning that it's a building or a garage that's already not in compliance with zoning laws, but was probably grandfathered in. Now they're saying just because it was non-conforming doesn't mean you can't build an ADU there. 

Then there's House Bill 1681 which establishes statewide standards for “innovative housing” — so we're talking tiny houses, tiny houses on wheels and yurts. It passed, it's on its way to Governor Ayotte, and she's been very much in favor of all of the housing legislation that has come across her desk, so I suspect that this will become law.

 Melanie Plenda:

Another thing lawmakers tackled was what to do with the proceeds from the sale of the notorious Sununu Youth Services Center. What happened there? 

Anna Brown:

The  Sununu Youth Services Center is a youth detention center in Manchester, and there are huge lawsuits about child abuse that happened at this center, so the state wants to sell this center. They are already building an alternative somewhere else in the state, but it's a bit of an odd property, and we're not sure when the sale is going to go through or how much it will sell for. This is about what happens with the money when the sale does actually happen.

The House wanted any proceeds to go to the general fund of all tax dollars, basically an open pool of money that could be spent on just about anything the state needs to. The Senate was more interested in specifically putting the proceeds towards the settlement fund, paying for these victim lawsuits, and so on. So, ultimately in the compromise, the Senate agreed to the House position, and any money from the sale will go into the general fund of all tax dollars. That being said, the state will probably need to consider the settlement fund as part of next year's state budget anyway, because we know that there are still a lot of lawsuits that are moving through the courts.

Melanie Plenda:

Voting laws have come under scrutiny lately. What happened in that realm? 

Anna Brown:

Earlier in the spring, the governor signed HB 323, which requires a government-issued ID to vote. Really, the difference here is we're getting rid of student IDs as an allowable voter ID in New Hampshire. To be clear, you could never register alone with a student ID — you still had to have other documentation, but now you can't even just use that for your picture to say, “I am who I say I am.”

Arguably, the more significant developments related to voting happened outside the Legislature. A federal court recently struck down New Hampshire's new requirement for citizenship documents — a birth certificate or passport when you're registering to vote, instead of signing an affidavit or something similar. That court ruling is probably not the final word on that issue, so expect more debate in the courts and the Legislature about what documents you need when you're registering to vote.

Melanie Plenda:

There seemed to be a lot of bills related to education finance — mostly related to school budgets or transparency, not actually funding the state’s obligation to students. Can you tell us more about those and where they stand? 

Anna Brown:

When the legislative session started in January, there was a lot of attention on Claremont, in particular, which was facing a major school budget shortfall, so a few of these bills are in response to that. HB 1816 allows the Department of Education to intervene in the administration of a public school district if the state Board of Education finds that the school district is in a “financial emergency,” — basically additional state oversight in situations similar  to Claremont in the future. Also, Senate Bill 586 requires school districts to be audited by an independent public accountant at the end of the fiscal year, and for those results to be made public. 

Those bills, as I said, are in response to Claremont, and as you noted, aren't really changing the school-funding formula — that's a big issue. There was a court ruling last summer that said the state is not fulfilling its obligation, but the court ruling did not say how the legislature should resolve it or when they need to resolve it.

This session the Legislature actually pushed back and passed HB 1815, which has already been signed by Governor Ayotte. It specifically states that how the state and its local governmental entities choose to raise, allocate and spend financial resources to implement this integrated public education system is a political policy matter reserved to legislative and executive judgment and control. It's interesting because that's more or less a statement of opinion from the Legislature. It doesn't just negate the court ruling that happened, but it's a clear indicator that they want to push back on that court ruling and that they support the governor's actions to appeal that judgment.

Melanie Plenda:

There were also bills related to nuclear and renewable energy. Where do those bills stand? 

Anna Brown:

There were some interesting bills on the margin that I would love to note. There was a bill that adds portable solar devices to state law, so basically tiny little plug-in solar panels. Then there was a bill that adds energy storage systems — batteries — to the state net metering law. Those are always some interesting, innovative changes.

On a larger scale.  I want to note HB 1775, which is on the way to Governor Ayotte. I’m not sure how she's going to fall on it, because this bill has been a little bit of a debate in the Legislature. It would allow utilities to invest in natural gas or nuclear power, so long as it was below a certain threshold — I think it was 10% of the total power that they're generating. It's small, but it is really a huge change from the decoupling we saw in the 1990s, when lawmakers said a utility can't own power plants and deliver electricity. This is going back on that, and supporters argue that this is an important way to bring more electricity to New Hampshire — more nuclear power, innovative energy development and to bring down electricity costs. Opponents are concerned that it's just going to be that vertical integration we saw in the past, where there's not as much competition.

Melanie Plenda:

Did anything else come up this session that you found surprising or interesting?

Anna Brown:

As a political nerd, one thing that was very interesting to me was how much the House and the Senate disagreed on some really big issues. I mentioned the CHARLIE Act, and that was also one of the most popular bills on the Citizens Count website, in terms of so many people going to read it and see what was happening with it. It was a huge priority for the House, but the Senate completely stripped it down, partly due to concerns about overreach or lawsuits.

There were two other notable issues that the House Republicans were really pushing for, and the Senate, even though it's also a Republican majority, said no thank you. One of those initiatives would remove immunization requirements for kids, and another one looked to end the refugee resettlement program in New Hampshire, and they were both rebuffed by the Senate. The moral of the story here to me is just because someone belongs to the Republican or Democratic party doesn't guarantee how they're going to vote on all issues, how they're going to govern. Yes, the parties are very polarized right now, but it is really important to get to know your local candidates.

Melanie Plenda:

Looking ahead, look into your crystal ball — is there anything you are looking at for next year?

Anna Brown:

One thing we haven't touched on was the concept of open enrollment. There was a big debate — should public school students be allowed to enroll in any public school in the state? Governor Ayotte was one of the reasons this bill didn't go forward. She said that it's not totally sorted out how this would work with funding and so on, but there were multiple attempts to push that forward. So I definitely expect that debate to continue.

Melanie Plenda:

Fascinating as always, thank you for joining us Anna Brown. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Learning from the fascinating astronomical wonders above us

What can the stars tell us about our past, present and future? More than you think. The skies are a fascinating place, full of many, many wonders. Sometimes those wonders even make their way to Earth, as we saw in the recent explosion of a meteor over New England. David McDonald, an astronomy teacher and Astronomy Club adviser – among many other things – at Belmont High School, has been studying the stars with his students and will share his insights with us.

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Melanie Plenda:

Tell us about the astronomy program and the Astronomy Club at Belmont High.

David McDonald:

I have about five students in my astronomy class, and I have about five students in my Astronomy Club. The club meets after school, and then we also have special events that we put on in astronomy class. It is a study in astronomy, from the nucleus of an atom to stars, black holes, and everything in-between. The Astronomy Club puts on different events for the public so that they can come and look through telescopes or be educated in some way.

Melanie Plenda:

What sparked your own interest in astronomy?

David McDonald:

I became interested in astronomy when I was in the 7th grade and came across a book in the library called, “Point to the Stars.” I picked it up and started thumbing through the pages and some transparency paper, traced some of the information and star shapes and constellations that were in the book, and went out and tried to find these things. Then, in the 9th grade, for Christmas, my parents bought me a telescope, and so now I'm looking at the stars with my eyes, finding constellations and stars and I'm hooked. I've been interested in it ever since. 

Melanie Plenda:

The Astronomy Club recently did a project about stars 250 light years away, in celebration of our nation’s independence. First, explain what a light year is exactly.

David McDonald:

A light year is how far light travels in a year. The speed is 186,000 miles per second. So, if we could flatten out earth — and this is not to say I'm part of the Flat Earth Society — a light beam would go around the circumference of earth seven and a half times in one second. From here to the moon, it takes about one second and a quarter. In a year, a beam of light travels about 580 billion miles in a year.

Melanie Plenda:

Tell us more about that 250 light years project. What did it entail? 

David McDonald:

Our project was to find stars that are about 250 light years away. One of the things we want to do is to be able to bring those stars to your backyard. So you can actually find these stars — and we found several that are bright enough to be easily found. What that means is when you go out in June and July, and you look at these stars today — the photons that are reaching your eyes are registering the light that left those stars 250 years ago when we were declaring our independence. 

Melanie Plenda:

Was your club tracking the meteor that fell on May 30, or did that catch you all by surprise? 

David McDonald:

I think it caught everybody by surprise, for sure. There's a website that I recommend to visit called Spaceweather, and as you scroll down a couple or three pages worth, you'll come to a place where it talks about near asteroids and meteors, and this one, which was about five meters in diameter was not even on the list for Saturday. So it literally came out of nowhere, and I think it surprised everybody, including astronomers. This was going like 42,000 miles an hour — which is like 60 times the speed of sound — and when you break the sound barrier, that's where you get that sonic boom happening, which was heard for many miles around. And it broke up around 30 or so miles up in the atmosphere, fragmented. The good news is nobody got hurt, and it landed around Cape Cod. 

The bad news is nothing landed in New Hampshire, which is sad, because you may or may not know, there's never been a meteorite found in New Hampshire. So if this thing was maybe 60 miles or so further north, and went in the ocean off Hampton Beach — because again, we don't want anybody getting hurt — maybe a fragment or two might have landed on the beach or something, and we could see the first meteorite found in New Hampshire.

Melanie Plenda:

What can amateur astronomers look out for if they check out the stars this summer? 

David McDonald: 

It's a great summer sky to look at, and so visually we have what's called the summer triangle, which are three stars. Vega is kind of in the overhead position, very bright white and bluish. Then there's a star called Deneb and at the tail of Cygnus the Swan. Then there's another star called Altair, which is in the constellation of Aquila the Eagle, and those three bright stars make up what we call the summer triangle.

Vega is in the constellation of Lyra the Harp, and there's like a quadrilateral there that you can see. Vega’s the brightest star, but right nearby, right near to the bottom two stars in the middle, what's called the Ring Nebula, and it is the remnants of a star that exploded a lot of years ago. With a large enough telescope, you can see in the middle there's a faint little dot, which is the white dwarf — the remnants of the star that exploded. 

Then watch out for the Perseid meteor shower, and Aug. 12 and 13 are generally the high points. You want to go out at night — the better time is after midnight — and one thing you have to do is get your eyes adjusted, because a lot of people, they go out in their porch, they go out of their driveway, they look up for 10 minutes, don't see anything and they go back inside. Your eyes aren't even adjusted yet to the darkness, so you want to go out for at least a half-hour. Somewhere between midnight and 4 o'clock in the morning, I would suggest you get your lawn chair out and sit back, look up and tell your neighbors to turn their lights out and enjoy the show, because the Perseid is generally a very active shower, where you may see 1520 meteors in the course of an hour.

Melanie Plenda:

David McDonald, astronomy teacher and club adviser at Belmont High, thank you for joining us today. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

Education Scorecard gives a detailed look at eroding progress in students’ skills

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Elementary school students’ progress in reading and math has been quietly stagnating and even eroding for more than a decade across the nation. What’s going on and how can we fix it? Dr. Douglas O. Staiger,  a professor at Dartmouth College who focuses on the economics of education and healthcare and one of the authors of the recently released Education Scorecard, discusses education outcomes across the nation and in New Hampshire.

Rosemary Ford:

What is the Education Scorecard?

Douglas O. Staiger:

This is a collaboration with the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research, the Stanford Equal Opportunity Project and me here at Dartmouth. We're trying to address a need for timely and comparable evidence on achievement across states and over time. Part of the problem is that every state has a different test; they have different standards for what's proficient. And we've used the nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress to kind of calibrate and put all the states on the same scale.

The goal of this project was to really get down to the level where we would be able to show people how their district has been doing, and every year since the pandemic, since 2022 we've been releasing the new annual data. Now the 2025 spring test is out, so people can look and see how they are doing. You can pull up your own district and a district report and see how you're doing relative to similar districts. For each district, we find four or five similar districts within the state, and relative to your state average.

We had 40 something states last year, but a few states we had to drop because of changes in their tests and we couldn't quite use their new data yet, so we have 37 states now. But it's pretty representative of the country. 

Rosemary Ford:

What are some of the key findings? 

Douglas O. Staiger:

The big picture is that many people don't know that we had an incredible growth in student achievement based on the nation's report card in the last two decades. Leading up to about 2013, many people have attributed that to the accountability in No Child Left Behind and similar state programs, and average achievement rates across the nation increased about two grade levels. So that means if students in the state were averaging about fourth grade level, if their fourth grade students were at that level in 1993 by 2013 on average they were at about a sixth grade level, an unbelievable improvement. Nobody would have guessed that was possible, but then starting around 2013 it's turned around. 

The increases were two grade levels in math and about one grade level in reading over that time period, but since 2013 both math and reading have steadily declined by about a grade level. So in math, we've lost half of the gains that we had in the prior two decades, and in reading we're back to where we were in the early ‘90s on reading scores. I think people haven't fully appreciated that there was this turnaround — that’s what we're calling the “education recession,” or the “learning recession,” and it was accelerated during the pandemic. We had some reports on what happened during the pandemic, but especially in math it had started before the pandemic. Since the pandemic, math has recovered a bit, reading has not — it's been flat or even declining. 

We've been looking at what's associated with these declines — especially since 2019 the pandemic and post-pandemic period — and we tend to see some things that maybe aren't surprising. Districts that spent more time in remote or hybrid learning during the pandemic had larger declines, and that was especially true in high-poverty districts. There were really two main things that seemed to be associated with which districts had the fastest recovery. One was all the money from the pandemic relief, the ESSER [the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund] money, some especially high-poverty districts were getting on average about $8,000 per student in recovery money — so real money that could be used for academic recovery. And what we see from 2022 in the recovery period until 2025 is actually fast recovery in the poorest districts. I think the wealthy districts have their own resources. The poorest districts got the pandemic relief, and it's the middle-range districts, the middle-income districts, that are still quite a bit behind and have had a very slow recovery from the pandemic.

Rosemary Ford:

How is New Hampshire doing?

Douglas O. Staiger:

New Hampshire has been in the middle of the pack for states across the country. They had a similar decline since 2013 and a similar decline over the pandemic since 2019. One interesting thing is at this point — both math and reading in New Hampshire have declined a similar amount since 2019 about four-tenths of a grade level., but they got there in different ways.

Math fell more during the pandemic, so by 2022 we were down about six-tenths of a grade level in math, and then it's recovered about two- tenths of a grade level in the last three years. Reading fell a little less, and then continued to decline. So now they're kind of both about four-tenths of a grade level behind where they were in 2019. So there's still a lot to do both in math and reading.

Rosemary Ford:

Based on your research, what would make a difference when it comes to education outcomes here in New Hampshire? For example, what advice would you give to policymakers?

Douglas O. Staiger:

There are a couple of things that jumped out. One is that I mentioned the ESSER money. That money, if spent wisely, can really matter, and right now those middle-income districts that didn't get a lot of ESSER money and didn't have their own resources have not recovered so well. Spending wisely at the state level — the state has limited resources, but the ability to somehow support those districts to improve, whether it's through resources or connections to other districts,

What is it that will make the most difference for your kids' achievement? Looking at evidence, looking at what other districts have done that seem to work, thinking about teachers are so critical. Thinking about what you can do to support your teachers to help them. My mantra is always, “A better teacher for less time.” They're being really heroic in the amount of time they put in teaching, so you can't expect them to put in more and more hours, you have to make them better teachers for the time they have.

Another thing that came out of our research is that it's very clear that absences went way up during the pandemic. Chronic absences about doubled from 2019 to 2022. They've come down a bit since, but they're still elevated. We found that with higher absence rates your students' test scores are more likely to be declining. Our estimates were roughly that if a student misses 10% of the days, which is chronic absence, they lose about 10% of a grade level. Now we found that if people got back to their old absence rates, where they were in 2019, it would make a noticeable difference. It wouldn't get you all the way back, but it would definitely have made a difference. So that's something I think many districts are focused on. There’s no magic bullet anyone's found on absences. A lot of things can make a small difference, and you have to kind of keep whittling away at it. 

Rosemary Ford:

Let’s talk a bit about the economic impact of some of these outcomes. There are people who may think, “I don’t have a kid or grandkid in the schools, why should this concern me?” How would you explain why this is important for everyone?

Douglas O. Staiger:

This is an investment. Economists call this an investment in human capital. There's good evidence that investments you make when kids are in school pay off later in life. You see their longer-term outcomes — not just things like earnings and working, which benefit the entire community, but also things like teen childbearing, crime and being in prison, being on income support. All those things people have found that when the test scores are rising in the state, — like for example that period where test scores increased so much from in the late in the ‘90s and 2000s — you could see the cohorts of kids who went through those schools later in life, and you really saw aligned changes in their life outcomes. People who are going to be adults, and these are going to be adults living in the community in 10 years. You want them to be successful, right? So, I think it will pay off for everybody in every dimension — not just earnings but there's a lot of other things, and all those things will be better if we make the investment now.

Rosemary Ford:

What’s next for the Education Scorecard?

Douglas O. Staiger:

We'll have more test scores. We'll be able to bring more states in for a variety of reasons. Each year we try to focus on some causes, what might be behind, and what are the current likely things that are causing the decline, or why some districts are rising. 

One of the next things is social media. The rise of cell phones and social media use in schools and by young people has gone way up, and that timing is right around when test scores started declining. So many people are concerned that maybe that is part of the cause. Like in New Hampshire, about half the states have some form of a ban on cell phones in public schools. Many others are working 24/7 trying to get evidence on this, because we don't really know about the effect of cell phones — there's met a lot of anecdotal evidence about how disruptive they are in the classroom and how they affect students' mental well-being, but there's not great evidence on whether these policies of banning cell phones have been able to reverse those effects. 

Rosemary Ford:

Thank you for joining us. 

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visitcollaborativenh.org.

Understanding property taxes in New Hampshire: Where does the money go and who pays them?

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

New Hampshire famously has no state income tax and no sales tax. So where does the government get the money to operate? Primarily property taxes. In New Hampshire, property taxes pay for roughly 61% of local government revenue — the highest percentage compared to any state in the country. Phil Sletten, research director of the N.H. Fiscal Policy Institute, talks about the ins and outs of property taxes in the Granite State.

Melanie Plenda:

Generally, how do property taxes work in New Hampshire?

Phil Sletten:

In New Hampshire, property taxes are based on an assessment of the value of the land and buildings on the land that's owned by a person or a company. Some states will tax other types of property, but in New Hampshire, it's the assessed value of that land and those buildings. The state requires that properties be assessed every five years at least. That usually happens with a city or town contracting with an agency to perform a physical site visit that determines what is the actual value, particularly the market value of that property, or what could the market value of that property be. 

The rates themselves are determined by the taxable property value within a city or town and the expenditures for local governments that cover that community. That includes municipal governments, city and town governments, school districts, county governments and any village districts or other governments that have a special taxing authority or expenditures within that community.

The property tax rate is set after all of the other revenue sources for that community are determined. That could be state or federal grants, motor vehicle registration fee payments, county nursing home fees, parking meter and parking ticket payments, money paid for school lunches — all that information goes to the state, and then the state evaluates, based on that and the assessed property values in the community, what the tax rate would be. It layers on the statewide education property tax as well, then approves that overall tax rate for that community. 

Melanie Plenda:

What do property taxes fund in New Hampshire?

Phil Sletten:

They're not a dedicated revenue source for the most part. There are two state-level property taxes. There's the statewide education property tax and the utility property tax. Those are both state taxes. Those are dedicated to funding public education and go to the state's Education Trust Fund.

The rest of the property taxes in the state depend on which local government is needing a certain amount of money for certain services. At the county level, property taxes might help pay for the county nursing home. At the school district level, property taxes might help pay for the expenses that school districts face, whether that's, special education costs, transportation costs, funding teacher salaries — that all goes into that education budget. At the municipal level, for city and town governments, it's for police and fire services, for upkeep of roads, trash collection, plowing roads — all of those things that cities and towns do on a regular basis.

Property taxes, in general, in New Hampshire are raised by local governments, and that property tax bill comes through on the municipal side, because those municipal borders matter a lot for what the property tax base is in a community. Those property tax bills — those aren't dedicated to funding one particular service or another beyond those different levels of government that they go to, whether it's counties or school districts or cities and towns. 

Melanie Plenda:

Why do these taxes vary so much from town to town, sometimes even between neighboring towns?

Phil Sletten:

I think it's important to remember that there's a couple of different parts to this equation. One is the expenditures that communities have. Different communities have different levels of need, different amounts of infrastructure that they need to take care of, in terms of the resources available within those communities and other revenue sources that those communities may have so that can affect property taxes. A lot of those decisions are made by voters locally: What quality of education are we providing there? What are the infrastructure needs? Do we have fire trucks that are running as well as we want our fire trucks to run? Those are all community-level decisions, so that's on the expenditure side. 

Even if all communities decided on exactly the same set of expenditures, the property taxes would vary because the property tax base matters a lot, and the amount of taxable property value within a community matters quite a bit. So some communities may have those higher expenses, but even if expenses were the same, the revenue picture would look different because of how communities are constrained by what's in their property tax base, and that affects the amount of money that's raised on a per-household or per-person basis. 

What do I mean by property tax base? I mean what can be taxed — what’s the taxable value of land and buildings within that community. And, based on that, if there's a higher amount of property that is taxable, then there's a lower tax rate. Or if there's a higher amount of taxable property per resident, then there may be a lower tax rate as well. 

Melanie Plenda:

How does having a focus on property taxes — without something like sales or income tax — impact the state?

Phil Sletten:

We do have some forms of sales tax — for example, the meals and rentals tax. When you go out to eat at a restaurant, you're paying a sales tax on that meal, if you're renting a hotel room or renting a car or if you're buying a pack of cigarettes or buying or selling property in the state, they're all forms of sales taxes that are within the state's tax system. However, we don't have a broad-based income tax or a broad-based sales tax — we're one of two states that don't have either a broad-based income or broad-based sales tax. The other is Alaska.

In New Hampshire, we rely on property taxes, and disproportionately on local property taxes to fund public services. That local focus is, I think, a particularly important component here, because that means that since we're relying on property taxes, and since we're relying on local property taxes to fund services — more than, on average, any other state in the country — that means that the value that happens to be in your community in taxable property value relative to its service needs can be very deterministic as to what you are paying in property taxes relative to the resources that you have or relative to the investments the community is seeking to make in itself. That can be very different depending on your income level.

For households with lower incomes, it tends to be a higher percentage of income that goes to property taxes in New Hampshire than households with the highest incomes. It's lower- and middle-income households that pay those higher effective tax rates based on property taxes in the state, whether it's passed through to renters or whether it's homeowners paying them directly. Those effective tax rates tend to be higher for lower- and middle-income households than for the highest-income households in the state.

Melanie Plenda:

Can you give us an example of what percentage of income property tax might be for someone who is lower income? 

Phil Sletten:

We can look at modeling from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. They did an evaluation of all states back in 2023 using 2023 incomes. If we look at those income levels, the bottom 20% of tax units — that’s individuals’ or family incomes — were $35,000 a year or less in tax income. If we look at those households that have that $35,000 a year or less in 2023, property taxes accounted for about 5.9% in the ITEP modeling. About 5.9% of income went to pay for property taxes in New Hampshire.

Again, that can vary substantially by town, and that does assume a certain amount of pass-through to renters. Renters are disproportionately more likely to have lower incomes — median household income for renters in New Hampshire is about half what it is for homeowners. So that 5.9% is for those lowest-income households. 

The next highest places that we see are in the middle 20% and then the fourth 20% — that’s the group between the middle and the highest 20%. For those middle- and upper-middle-income households, about 5% of income, on average, goes to pay for property taxes in New Hampshire.

If we look at the highest-income households, particularly the top 1% of income households — in 2023 that was $721,000 a year or more — their effective property tax rate was about 2%. That’s about a third of what it is for for the bottom 20% — those $35,000 a year or less.

Melanie Plenda:

This also affects people who don’t own property, yes? 

Phil Sletten:

If you're a renter, those property tax bills that your landlord has, or the property owner has — those still have to get paid somehow. There may be different strategies that different landlords have to pass those costs on, or to absorb those costs, but it likely increases rent for everyone who's renting, because it is a cost to owning a property in New Hampshire.

Those figures that I just spoke about — the 5.9% of income going to property taxes for a household with $35,000 a year or less in 2023 — that is including the assumption of how much is passed on in terms of property tax cost to renters. It's not assuming all of it, but it's assuming much of it is passed on to renters — and that assumption, if we look at what the cost of renting versus owning is, again, depends on which community you're in, and it depends on which year you're looking at. But property taxes effectively raise the cost of maintaining all properties in the state, because it's an additional bill associated with owning that property, owning that wealth, owning that building, etc.

Melanie Plenda:

What’s the solution here?

Phil Sletten:

It depends on what your goal is. When it comes to ways that property taxes could be, for example, alleviated for lower-income households, there are states that employ property tax credits or homestead exemptions that will help households with low and moderate incomes afford property taxes and be reflective of what their incomes are.

In New Hampshire, we have the low- and moderate-income homeowners property tax credit. It's a relatively small rebate that the state provides relative to the statewide education property tax, although it was expanded relatively recently — and actually for people who are interested in signing up for that, the window to sign up is open until June 30. 

There are other ways. Sometimes they're called circuit breakers by people who are in the policy and economic world that are trying to make property taxes a little bit more reflective of the resources that people have, or if it's a primary home versus a secondary home. Now, every state is different in terms of what's permissible under the state constitutions. New Hampshire does have a clause in its constitution that has been interpreted to mean that there can't be graduated tax rates for similar types of taxation on similar economic activity. So there are then legal questions around what some of those solutions would look like in New Hampshire that I think complicates what is a transferable solution from other states.

There are other ways that the state could raise revenue or permit local governments to raise revenue. There are proposals at the state level to allow local governments to put either a surcharge or some other add-on to the meals and rentals tax, particularly the hotels portion, to raise money from people who are renting hotel rooms that are within those municipalities’ borders. That money would then stay locally, as opposed to going to the state and then, in some cases, being redistributed by the state to local governments. Those are the sorts of mechanisms that have been proposed in the past to help offset some local property taxes and to even out what may be the municipal share of funding services. 

Melanie Plenda:

You recently published an analysis of the disparities in how property taxes affect residents in different towns, and produced an accompanying podcast on the issue. Where can people find this podcast or more information if they are interested?

Phil Sletten:

I'd encourage folks to again look at the full report at nhfpi.org. We have interactive maps to let people examine what's going on in their local community, unpack some of the details of these issues and more interstate comparisons as well. Our regular podcast, “New Hampshire Uncharted,” can be found on Apple podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube, Podbean and iHeartRadio. I hope everyone is able to download it and enjoy listening.

Melanie Plenda:

Thank you for joining us, Phil.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.

It’s your money: budgeting while costs keep rising

By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

With grocery and gas prices fluctuating all the time, it’s hard to know how to budget right now. Maureen Milliken, who writes the “It’s Your Money” column for Ink Link, shares some financial insights and some tips for navigating this tricky time, and hopefully padding your wallet.

Rosemary Ford:

A few months ago, when you were last here, we discussed your tracking of grocery prices and their connection to the tariffs and other economic factors. How's that going, and what's been happening with the tracking lately?

 Maureen Milliken:

It started last April 2025, prompted by the tariffs. We tracked grocery prices for a year to see what happened, and obviously, a lot has happened. We learn something new every month. I just want to kind of disclaim that it's called the “grocery snapshot,” because it's kind of a snapshot of a variety of things that I normally buy. It's not like some big scientific study of grocery prices in general, but more kind of a relatable look, and I use what's happening with my items as kind of a springboard to talk about why prices go up and down and what's happening in general with things like produce or coffee. 

Rosemary Ford:

What have you seen steep rises in?

Maureen Milliken:

The biggest price rise in the year has been a 12-ounce bag of coffee. Whole bean, because I use a French press — I’m kind of picky — has gone up from $10.49 last April, and it is now $12.49, so it's gone up $2 which, percentage-wise, is a pretty big increase. I naively thought November, when the tariffs for coffee beans were lifted, that the price was going to go down. But first of all, prices have a tendency to go up and not go down. Second of all, it's not only tariffs that are affecting coffee beans. They have to be grown in a certain climate. and unfortunately, the places they're grown are the most susceptible to climate change and plant diseases that come with it. So it's a very challenging product right now. 

Another item is chocolate. I think last time I was on was right after Hershey had proactively announced that the prices were going to go up. That was a little bit before Halloween, but they already had all their Halloween candy made, so that was all set. But the things that affect coffee are the same things that affect chocolate, where the cocoa bean can be grown. 

Nothing has really declined in price, and in a year, produce has a tendency to go up and down. Last month, when I looked at the yearly arc, there were maybe three produce products — bananas, cucumbers and oranges — that had all gone down from what they were the April before. But all those have, except for bananas, seen big spikes, and I just was looking at my shopping list today on my grocery stores app, and cucumbers are now $1.29 apiece when they were 79 cents apiece two weeks ago. But produce is very susceptible to so many things that have nothing to do with tariffs that the prices just go crazy.

Rosemary Ford:

Is the war with Iran having an impact on prices?

Maureen Milliken:

It is. The biggest impact is to energy prices. There's a long chain of effects that ends up affecting your pocketbook, and the energy costs of transporting produce, of making fertilizer and all those other things, affects the cost. The first and biggest cost is to beef. Beef prices are affected because of energy prices, because of transportation costs, supply chain costs, the cost of fertilizer to grow the feed that the beef eat, and the USDA says that beef has already gone up 6.4%. The USDA just released its price prediction a few days ago, and it's predicted that it's going to go up another 6.3% this year.

I personally don't eat a lot of red meat. I'm not a vegetarian, but I just live by myself, and it's just never been cost-effective to buy it and use it. It's not on the tracker, but it would have, I think, have had a big impact. I track 26 things, and it’s gone up 6.5% in the past year, as opposed to the 2.7% that the USDA says grocery prices have gone up. But I think if beef was on there, that would be a much higher number. 

Even if the war ended an hour from now, and anything keeping energy from moving around the world was resolved immediately, you would still see it affecting prices for the rest of this year. When something has an impact on prices, the domino effect and the chain of events is such that there are just long-term impacts that are very difficult to solve. 

Rosemary Ford:

Are there other factors playing into the rise of prices?

Maureen Milliken:

When I first started this I was thinking of the tariffs and not thinking in more general terms, but so many things affect prices, including politics. Pasta, which I guess the federal government has had a bee in its bonnet for the last 20 or 30 years. They claimed that Italian imports were being dumped at lower prices than they should be into the market, which was affecting the price of pasta made in the U.S. There's been this like a 30-year investigation of it, which came to a head at the end of last year, and they were going to put this super tariff on pasta, which would be kind of ironic, since they were claiming that it was affecting U.S. made pasta prices. But if the price of imported pasta goes up, then the price of pasta made in the U.S. will go up. 

Rosemary Ford:

What do you plan to do to navigate this time?

Maureen Milliken

My plans are the same that I advocate — not only in the grocery snapshot, but in my money column. This goes beyond grocery prices, which is you have to be your best advocate for saving money. The grocery prices aren't going to magically come down because you're upset that they're high. If people say they don't have the time to plan meals or to cook or to research prices, you have to make the time. Time is money, and the more it becomes a habit, the more you'll be able to do that. Some quick tips are, if you're able shop at a large chain of which there are many, use the rewards. Use their apps which have rewards, coupons, savings and recipes. Figure out substitutions. Buy cheaper things. I know it sounds like it's a simplification. Eat more bananas, fewer $6 packages of cookies. One thing I've actually done is my mom cooked for six kids and liked to make healthy meals, but we didn't have a lot of money growing up, and I've revived some of my mom's recipes. They're fairly easy to make and they're nutritious, and they're not things I normally think of eating. I would also say that people with kids, until they reach around teenage age, can be the biggest advocates for change in your house. If you get them involved in thinking of ways to cut food costs and plan meals and plan grocery lists. Also track what you're wasting, track what's going in the trash. Start buying something else you're going to eat versus whatever's going into the garbage. 

Rosemary Ford:

When you’re writing your column, what do you hope people take away as a lesson or learn from what they’re reading?

Maureen Milliken:

My biggest hope that people take away — not only with grocery prices, but with anything — is that you're the biggest advocate, and you're the one who has the power to change whatever is going on financially with your life. You may not be able to change everything. I know people have a lot of challenges, but you have to be proactive. You have to do the research and use your money from a place of knowledge. Figure out where your money's going and what you're doing with it and why you're buying what you're buying. It's hard work, and it's hard to break habits, but knowledge is power, and people need to be informed and have insight into their lives and what they're doing with their money, instead of feeling that it's this thing that's just kind of washing them away that they have no control over.

Rosemary Ford:

Thank you, Maureen.

“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.