Last fall, high school teacher Penny Culliton received a notice from the New Hampshire Department of Education that appeared to expand the scope of a parental notification law passed in 2017. 

The department’s initial advisory to schools had said that the law – which requires educators to notify parents two weeks before they teach about sexuality or sexual education – was not intended “to apply to literature” and rather was meant to focus on “health class or biology class”.

Culliton, who has taught English at Mascenic Regional High School in New Ipswich for decades, therefore assumed the law didn’t apply to her courses.

But then a second advisory sent last September – six years after the initial one – made her think otherwise. “Curriculum content that includes information about ‘human sexuality’ in an English Language Arts Class or a Social Studies class would invoke the notice requirement,” department attorney Diana Fenton wrote.

Though nothing had changed legislatively, Culliton understood the new notice to mean that her own requirements had. Absent additional guidance, she decided to send her principal a list of potentially qualifying books for the year to pass on to parents.

“It was pretty much everything we teach,” Culliton said of her list, which included Romeo and Juliet and The Scarlett Letter.

Then, last month, the law did change.

In July, Gov. Chris Sununu approved a major expansion, House Bill 1312, which will add sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and gender expression to the list of topics that require two weeks’ advance notice.

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Culliton’s confusion about the 2017 law and the DOE’s potentially changing interpretation of it years later could foreshadow questions that may emerge in classrooms this fall as educators scramble to understand the expansion’s broader scope.

The Department of Education has yet to release an advisory about how educators should respond, but a department spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that written guidance is “being finalized”. The law will go into effect Sept. 17, just weeks into the school year.

Teachers are set to return to their classrooms in less than a month, and “it’s going to start to get a little unsettling for a lot of teachers going in, not knowing how this is actually going to play out,” said Megan Tuttle, the president of the statewide teacher’s union NEA-NH.

Educators and school districts will have to answer two major questions: What type of content requires notification? And, what form must that notification take?

With respect to the former question, Tuttle described the law as “vague.”

“Any curriculum that has anything to do with ‘sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or gender expression’ is so broad,” Tuttle said. “That could be brought up in almost any class, almost any grade level, to be honest.”

It’s also unclear whether the blanket notification Culliton sent out at the beginning of the year would qualify. DOE spokesperson Kim Houghton did not respond to a request for clarification and the previous advisories from 2017 and 2023 say only that “strong policies will include multiple modes of notification”.

By mid-September, school districts will have to revise their written policies.

“We will work as fast as we can,” said Concord School Board President Pamela Walsh. The district’s current policy states only that the notice must provide parents with contact information for a staff member.

Proponents of the expansion, which passed this spring by one vote in the House of Representatives and by three in the Senate, have argued that the notification requirements are an issue of parents’ rights.

Sen. Tim Lang, a Sanbornton Republican who backed the bill, previously told New Hampshire Bulletin that the law would prompt parents to make informed decisions about what content their children are exposed to at school. Lang said that the bill would not apply to coursework about LGBTQ+ people, but rather to any instruction that delved into students’ own sexual orientation or gender identity.

But opponents, including Tuttle, have argued the law doesn’t explicitly describe the barriers Lang has laid out, and that it will therefore have a chilling effect on the classroom.

“It’s another subjective law right that’s leaving the teachers wondering whether they’re complying with it,” Tuttle said. “You could inadvertently say something and not know that you’re running afoul of the law.”

Culliton said her approach will be the same as last year’s: she will send out a list of her entire syllabus at the beginning year. She also plans to make lesson plans available online, something she has done in the past.

Culliton has no issue keeping parents informed about what she is teaching, but she bristles at the implication that course content about gender and sexuality is objectionable.

“I’m not going to stop teaching an author because someone finds something distracting,” Culliton said. “Frankly that’s a bizarre statement to make about teenagers. These are not seven-year-olds.”