Senator Lasky
Alderman-Elect, did you mean by having public funds going to private and religious schooling? The bill that was
just passed out of committee, is that what you’re referring to?
Alderman-Elect Jette
Yes.
Senator Lasky
| am wholly against it. | think if this continues it could be the death nail for public education. | think we support
alternative schooling. | think there is an obligation for that, but for public funds to go to religious schools and
private schools, | think it is a violation of the separation of Church and State, and it is, again, going to hurt our
public schools, where | believe the funds should go. Yes, to address problems within the public schools. But
they’re never going to get fixed if we continually take away from what they need to have. | will fight that bill, if it
should come forward.
Representative Mangipudi
In terms of funding that, the way | understand is every dollar that is taken out of public schools, say 100 students
come out of public schools there are 12,000 students, they come from 16 different schools, the infrastructure, the
maintenance and the staffing cannot reduce, but the funding is being drained from the public schools. So we
have to look at the bigger picture. | am totally against it because it only takes a small portion. If my child gets
$2,500 to go to a private school, show me which good private school takes $2,500 to educate my child? It’s not
quality education, it’s a feel-good. This is a, “We're doing the right thing. We're giving the parents a choice.” But
we are not giving the parent a choice, and we are depleting the resources that are coming to the public schools.
The infrastructure, the funding system for staff and all of that cannot be cut in public schools with 100 or 200
people going away from that. So in that aspect, we have to highlight if the delegation is not on board, because
we have to come together as a delegation of a city of this size. And as long as we can back that up, and it’s
about what’s good for Nashua. It’s not about party line.
Representative Klee
The issue that | have with it is we have a Constitution that basically says we cannot use tax dollars for religious
schooling or anything of that nature. | think we kind of play a game because we have our education fund that
comes from lottery and other kinds of money, so they can probably play the word game and say they’re not using
tax dollars for it. But the bottom line is we're still funding religious schooling and so on. I’m very much against it. |
would be fighting it as much as | possibly can. It’s come out of committee and we'll see where it goes from there.
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja
About two months ago, you couldn’t go anywhere and talk to anyone who had even a slight sense of what was
going on in the state who wasn’t talking about Amazon and where they were going to be, and New Hampshire’s
chance of landing Amazon. | listened on the radio one morning and to my surprise | heard the Governor talk
about, “Well, we'll start investigating rail’ because Amazon wants rail. | think there are many of us in the city and
across the state who have understood that rail is important. It’s an economic driver. And we all hear about
millennials not wanting cars, but | tell you what, when | go to a city where | have good public transportation, |
don’t rent a car. | use the cabs, | use the buses, and | use the subways. And | don’t even need my Smart phone.
| can walk up and read it, figure out which stop | need, and it works. And when I’m in a country where English
isn’t the major language, | can read the map and figure out where to go.
But we all knew rail was important and all of a sudden, we’re going to start looking at rail, instead of being kind of
shovel ready and knowing what we were doing. | bring this up because we moved here 20 years ago and in
some ways it seems like I’ve been here forever, and in other ways we’re quite new here. But one of the things
we did when we looked at where we were going to live in relationship to where my husband was going to be
working at Lockheed Martin, because we were coming here with a five-year-old daughter and we hoped to be
