NH Senate Activity. 13 May

Ed Comm hearings, Tuesday, 13 May.  This was executive session day, no hearings.  We only had two bills to deal with.  HB 131 was an attempt to recover the Signum University degree granting authority.  We passed a bill in the Senate to grant degree granting authority to Signum back a month ago.  For some unclear reason the House killed it last week.  We tried to revive it by tacking the Signum bill onto HB 131 as a rider.  Ed committee chairman Senator Jay Kahn discouraged this scheme, saying the house would kill it.  He suggested we offer the Signum amendment as a floor amendment during senate session this week.  Well, that never happened, and Signum, an innovative way to gain a college degree is without NH support, even though the NH Dept of Ed thinks they are doing good.  Too bad. 

   Then we rehashed HB 226 which would grant teachers their “experienced educator” certificate after only three years of class room teaching, instead of the current five years.  We added a lot of verbiage to the bill, making it harder to figure out what it was doing.   Which is OK by me.  Three years of class room teaching is plenty.  In the Air Force we put teachers in front of classrooms after only three weeks of training.  And the Air Force teachers, just sergeants, pulled right off the flight line, with classes of rowdy teen aged airmen, did just fine.  I took some courses and the instructors were as good as, of better than, any teachers I ever had. 

Anyhow, Tuesday cleaned up the last Ed Comm bills.  No Ed Comm hearings next Tuesday.