Data On Equity In New Hampshire Schools Is Lacking

By Katharine Webster, InDepth NH

Are schools in New Hampshire providing all children equal access to educational opportunities and disciplining and protecting them fairly, regardless of disability, race, ethnicity and sex?

It’s hard to tell from either the state Department of Education’s “School Safety” data, which only reports racial, disability, and gender bias for incidents of student-on-student bullying, or the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights website, where the data is years out of date.

That’s due to differences among the data they collect, new executive orders and policy changes since President Trump took office, and the gutting of the federal Department of Education.

And the data that does exist is unreliable, according to plaintiffs in two lawsuits filed against the state in federal court: one over a 2021 law banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” regarding race and gender (the state lost in U.S. District Court last year but is appealing); and the other over a 2025 law that bans all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, policies and new contracts in K-12 schools, colleges and universities that receive state funding.

“I’ve seen in many schools that incidents of (physical) restraint are underreported,” said James McKim, an organizational consultant who has worked with several school districts on educational equity and is a plaintiff in the recent lawsuit over the anti-DEI bill.

“Teachers are responsible for reporting (restraint and seclusion), and teachers are scared to report … because they don’t know what the ramifications will be for them,” said McKim, who is also the recent past president and current first vice president of the Manchester NAACP.

Tina Kim Philibotte, former chief equity officer for the Manchester Public Schools, says the data is unreliable, not because schools don’t want to comply but because they lack clear guidance and training in consistent data collection _ and because they’re using a hodgepodge of software.

“What you’re going to find out is that almost from school to school, district to district, the data is inconsistent,” said Kim Philibotte, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit over the 2021 state law that banned the teaching of “divisive concepts” concerning race and gender. “Principals are doing the best they can with the burdens they’re working under.”

Answering the question of whether New Hampshire schools treat all students equitably is more important than ever, as the state works to implement the new anti-DEI law and school districts and educators challenge it.

But finding the answers is harder than it has been in decades because of President Trump’s executive orders and cuts to the U.S. Department of Education and difficulties in viewing the data and new policies – and comparing them to previous guidance under the Biden and Obama administrations, much of which has been deleted from the department’s website.

What Data is Collected, and What Does it Say?

In addition to bullying incidents, the state requires schools to report the total number of physical restraint and seclusion incidents; the number of “harassment” complaints; the number of incidents resulting in students being suspended or expelled; truancy numbers; and other safety data.

The state data shows wide discrepancies in restraint and seclusion incidents, for example, with schools in some of the state’s wealthiest districts reporting far higher rates than districts that struggle with lower funding and greater need. McKim says he suspects that is due to differences in what districts think they need to report.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is required to collect and publish more comprehensive data that looks at, for example: how frequently students with physical or learning disabilities are physical restrained; the percentage of transgender students who report being sexually harassed, assaulted or bullied; and the race and ethnicity of students enrolling in advanced coursework such as AP and dual-enrollment college classes.

But the most recent state-level data for New Hampshire reported by the U.S. Department of Education is for the 2020-21 school year. Partial data for 2021-22 was published by the Office for Civil Rights in January, with no state-level data included.

More comprehensive data for the 2023-24 school year was still being collected during the first months of 2025. In response to an email query, the Office for Civil Rights said it is planned for release early next year.

“Who knows if there will even be a U.S. Department of Education to release a report next year?” said Kim Philibotte, noting that President Trump issued an executive order in March abolishing the department.

Since then, the Trump administration has cut about half of the department’s workforce. Twenty-one Democratic-led states sued, but last month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the cuts, 6-3.

What the data does show is that in New Hampshire’s two most racially and ethnically diverse school districts, Manchester and Nashua, white students were disciplined at a rate about equal to their share of the school population, Asian Americans were disciplined less and Black and Hispanic students were more likely to face discipline in 2020-21.

When it came to taking Advanced Placement (AP), honors and dual-enrollment college classes, the numbers were starkly reversed. In Manchester, for example, Asian American students accounted for 10 percent of AP course enrollments although they made up less than 5 percent of the district’s students, while Hispanic students accounted for less than 8 percent of AP course enrollments although they made up 27 percent of the district’s students.

Kim Philibotte said that in 2013, under the Obama administration, the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights placed Manchester under “compliance review” and monitored the city’s progress in achieving greater equity in higher-level learning opportunities for students who are Black, Latino or English language learners.

Although the district made significant progress over the next decade in addressing those disparities, it was still under compliance review when Kim Philibotte left the district a year ago – probably because the Office for Civil Rights failed to respond to the most of the district’s progress reports, she said.

Manchester is no longer listed on the Office for Civil Rights’ website as under review. Amadou Hamady, the district’s executive director of student engagement, outcomes and success, did not return a phone message asking for insight into the data.

Other New Hampshire schools and colleges remain under compliance review, with the overwhelming majority of complaints involving violations of disability rights.

Where’s the Beef? Missing Web Pages and Data

In January, the U.S. Department of Education released a proposal to update the guidelines for collecting civil rights data from K-12 schools, based on executive orders that included banning diversity, equity and inclusion in all public agencies and in schools that receive federal funds, as well as one that defines a person’s gender as either “biologically” male or female, based on that child’s apparent sex at birth.

During the 30-day public comment period that ensued, advocates for LGBTQ+ students complained that the proposed data collection guidelines failed to include transgender (as well as nonbinary and intersex) students.

They noted that transgender students report significantly higher rates of sexual assault and harassment, bullying and discrimination than their cisgender peers, and that the anti-DEI order would make it illegal to use public funds to prevent or remedy that.

If the Department of Education does not collect civil rights data about transgender and nonbinary students, it will also be hard for schools to seek private funding to help them, said Hilary Lustick, a New Hampshire native and assistant professor of education at UMass Lowell who researches inequities in school discipline and how to prevent them.

“You can’t apply for grants to help a population if you don’t have the data in the first place,” Lustick said. “We’re erasing people’s existence and therefore denying them the chance to get services.”

The Office for Civil Rights withdrew the proposed revision to the mandatory civil rights data collection policy in early February “so that additional changes could be made … for consistency with the federal civil rights laws that OCR enforces, including Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, and the Trump Administration’s 2020 Title IX Rule.”

That interpretation of Title IX, which the second Trump administration has reinstated, likewise excludes any mention of transgender students.

On Aug. 7, the Office of Management and Budget posted the Department of Education’s “replacement ICR (Information Collection Request)” and “proposed (civil rights) data elements” for another 30 days of public review and comment.

However, both were offline last Monday. While the ICR link was restored Tuesday, it simply asks for comment on the “cost burden” in work hours and dollars for schools to collect the data, without saying what that data consists of.

The proposed data elements were unavailable for viewing all week. That means the public, including school administrators and state departments of education, have been unable to read and comment on them.

In response to emailed questions about the inaccessible information, the Office for Civil Rights said that, “Unfortunately, there have been some unforeseen issues with Reginfo.gov. I cannot explain why maintenance is going on to prevent the viewing of and commenting on ICRs,” because the website is run by the Office of Management and Budget.

The Associated Press reported Thursday that the Office of Management and Budget’s entire government data website was offline over the weekend of Aug. 16-17 and that much of it had not been restored by the end of last week.

Asked by this reporter whether the public comment period for the proposed changes in civil rights data collection would be extended, given that they have been unavailable for review for at least five days, the Office for Civil Rights did not respond Friday.

State Moves Forward with Anti-DEI Efforts

Various organizations, including the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, have sued over Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders and his attempts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

In New Hampshire, the chief justice for the U.S. District Court, Landya McCafferty, issued a preliminary injunction in April to prevent the U.S. Department of Education from enforcing its ban on DEI in education, which came with a threat to cut federal funding to schools that failed to comply. Two U.S. district courts in other states issued similar injunctions.

The New Hampshire injunction was sought by the National Education Association and its New Hampshire affiliate, several school districts and the Center for Black Educator Development.

Still, the state Legislature has moved forward with its own anti-DEI legislation based on Trump’s executive orders, passing it as part of House Bill 2, the budget rider that took effect July 1.

The state Department of Education quickly sent letters to schools – including private colleges and universities whose students receive state scholarships – requiring them to certify that they do not have any diversity, equity and inclusion policies, programs or other initiatives, at the risk of losing state funding.

The state’s two largest teachers’ unions – the NEA-New Hampshire and the American Federation of Teachers – four school districts, McKim and a professor sued, arguing that the law is unconstitutionally vague and impinges on their free speech rights. They asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent the state from requiring schools to certify that they are in compliance by Sept. 5.

The state responded late Thursday to the plaintiffs’ request, arguing that the law is clear and the plaintiffs failed to show that they had standing to sue or how they would be harmed. A hearing on the injunction request has been set for this Wednesday before McCafferty.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.