The Final Votes Have Been Cast, What Now?

June 22nd, 2026

On June 4, the House and Senate cast their final votes of the 2027 session. Of the more than 200 bills Reaching Higher NH was tracking this year, 40 are now on their way to the governor’s desk. Here, we take a quick look at some of the most consequential bills awaiting Gov. Ayotte’s decision. 

What’s headed to the governor

Despite the fact that school district spending caps are generally unpopular, the legislature passed HB 1300, which would require every district to put a tax cap question on the general election ballot.

Tax caps do not change the amount it costs to provide a quality education. They do not increase state funding, or redistribute it in a more equitable way. Tax caps simply make it harder for school districts to budget. RHNH has written about the technical concerns with this bill, and about the ways it might interact with other legislation. If HB 1563 (changing the special education funding formula) and HB 1610 (limiting district contingency funds) are signed along with HB 1300, districts will have to budget for changing special education costs (which are already unpredictable), while assuming no increase in funding and no ability to build or maintain a funding reserve. If Governor Ayotte allows these bills to take effect together, school boards could be left with fewer tools to manage increasingly unpredictable costs.

Another bill headed to the governor changes the terms of operation for cooperative school districts. HB 1374 makes two changes that seem to conflict with each other in principle. 

• First, the bill makes it easier for towns to withdraw from a cooperative school district, switching from a vote of the entire district to a vote of only the withdrawing town. 

• Second, the bill makes it harder for voters in one town to determine the fate of the schools located there by requiring  all voters served by a school to have the chance to vote on its closure. 

If HB 1374 is signed into law, a small town in a cooperative district could now see its community hub closed because voters in the larger town next door don’t want to pay for it. The bill also states that a vote on closing a school can be triggered by a petition from 20 voters. 

If 20 voters feels like a low threshold for a petition of this kind, you are not alone. The school closure piece of HB 1374 originally moved through the legislature as SB 588. In the committee hearing on that bill, Senators agreed that the 20 voter threshold was too low. Before they were able to change that language, however, the bill was referred to interim study and effectively killed. It was then resurrected when the text of SB 588 was tacked onto HB 1374 by the Senate. As a result, the requirement remained at 20 voters and the issue never received a public hearing in the House.

Also headed to the governor are SB 434 and SB 430, two bills that received a concurrence vote without needing a committee of conference. SB 434 is seen by many as a book ban bill, and requires school boards to create policies to handle parental complaints about “inappropriate" materials. Gov. Ayotte has a history of vetoing book bans, but it is unclear where she stands on this particular flavor of book ban. SB 430, also seen as a parental rights bill, requires teachers to respond to any written request from a parent within 10 days. Administrators and teachers worry about the burden this could place on teachers, as well as how it will undermine teachers’ ability to build trusting relationships with students. 

Bills Headed to the Governor:

(Updated as of June 22, 2026)



Bills that have been signed into law:

(Updated as of June 22, 2026)

Bills that have Been Vetoed:

(Updated as of June 22, 2026)

What did not survive committee of conference

A few bills did not make it out of the committee of conference process – most notably HB 751, which was yet another attempt at open enrollment. Though members of the committee of conference agreed at the last minute to a version of the bill no one had seen before, the bill was tabled in the Senate and never discussed. 

HB 1792, which would have placed limits on what teachers could discuss in the classroom, and in one iteration would have allowed parents to sue schools for teaching “identity based ideologies,” ultimately did not survive crossover. The Senate passed a replace-all amendment that  would instead have updated the existing “divisive concepts” law, ruled too vague by the courts, by clarifying that teachers must purposefully teach one of the banned concepts in order to be in violation of the law. The House rejected the Senate’s version, so ultimately neither survives. 

The two chambers also failed to agree on a recess bill. SB 578 made it to committee of conference as a bill about play-based curriculum, but the House and Senate could not agree on whether to mandate recess and whether to expand or change the definition of play-based curriculum. 

Bills without a Concurrence Vote:

What’s Next

Bills that passed must now be enrolled, where they’re checked a final time for typos and inconsistencies. Bills must then be signed by either the Senate President or the House Speaker, and then they make their way to the governor. Once the governor receives a bill, she has five days to act, otherwise the bill automatically becomes law. The legislature will have a chance to override any vetoes, likely in the fall.