A bill to reduce required subject areas for public schoolchildren in New Hampshire, including music and art, has received quite a chilly reception at the Statehouse.

As of 2 p.m. Tuesday, more than 30,000 people had registered their opposition to House Bill 283 on the state Legislature’s website.

Speaker after speaker blasted the proposal in a public hearing on Monday.

Rep. Dan McGuire, R-Epsom, has no co-sponsors for his bill.

The measure would remove public school requirements for musical and visual arts, world languages, engineering and technology, personal finance, computer science and some portions of social studies.

McGuire told the N.H. House Education Policy and Administration Committee that by limiting state requirements, schools would be free to focus more on key subject areas where test scores have declined in recent years such as math, English and science.

“I tend to think you’ve got to walk before you can run,” he said. “For schools struggling in English, struggling in math, they need to spend more time on those subjects.”

He also said the bill wouldn’t prohibit schools from teaching a full range of subjects, it would just reduce requirements that they do so.

McGuire said it’s useful to know a foreign language, but not essential.

“Would you rather be able to do math and deal with numbers at a higher level or learn French?” he asked.

“To me you’ve got to know math. You can have a fine life and not know French, but you can’t have a good life and not be able to deal with numbers because people will cheat you, you won’t be able to estimate, you won’t be able to deal with taxes and money.”

Nobody other than McGuire spoke in favor of the bill during the three-hour public hearing.

Some speakers said it would exacerbate existing educational disparities in a system that depends largely on property taxpayers.

Schools in areas with lower property values and higher tax rates would likely cut subjects and reduce faculty if the bill were to pass, while schools in communities with higher property values would maintain course offerings, they said.

Keene Mayor Jay Kahn, a former state senator, told the committee the current state requirements arose from bipartisan legislation over the years.

“These are not left-wing people coming up with woke curriculum,” he said. “These are the basic needs for technologically prepared, global citizens and responsible adults and that should be the goal of public education.”

Other speakers said diverse course offerings do not detract from learning math, English and science, but often enhance such learning.

Others said the current curriculum requirements lead New Hampshire to rank highly in comparison to most other states in academic achievement, and they noted that some college admission standards include taking a foreign language.

Paul Beaulieu of Sandown was one of 71 people who filed online comments in favor of HB 283. “As a taxpayer in the school system and a father of a child in the school system, I see the problem of not concentrating on core reading, writing and arithmetic, the three R’s as they used to be called,” he said.

“Removing the necessity to cover so many things hopefully will help in teachers being able to graduate students who know how to read and do basic math fluidly and flawlessly.”

Test scores have generally fallen in recent years. For example, N.H. Department of Education data show that 21 percent of students at Keene High School achieved proficiency in math last year, compared to 32 percent 2022.

Bill Gillard, a math teacher at the school, said in an interview Tuesday the effects of lost learning opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic are still being seen.

He said the purpose of HB 283 is to reduce the costs of public education, not to improve educational outcomes.

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