Despite significant efforts to support new and beginning farmers (NBFs), substantial challenges persist in the agricultural sector, the foremost being land access. 

“Without ownership or secure land tenure, farmers can’t invest, improve, or grow their business,” Rachel Brice with Land for Good (LFG) said. In New England, where her organization  is based, the high cost of land is one of the biggest barriers. 

“Young and beginner farmers who do not have the opportunity to participate in a family transition are especially challenged,” said Charlene Andersen, a farm and food lender with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund. For these NBFs, fast-paced pressure from within the real estate market can reduce their chances of finding agricultural land they can afford. And the overlapping need for housing on or near the farm compounds search struggles.

“Rising costs are due in part to intense competition from developers and non-farmers seeking second homes or estate properties,” Brice said. This can certainly take NBFs with little capital out of the running, especially if they lack connections within the farming community. “Many land transactions occur through word of mouth before properties are publicly listed,” Brice said. 

She serves as program and development manager at LFG, focusing on providing support and expert guidance around land access, tenure, and transfer. Her organization, alongside the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, is an example of hundreds of groups working within the farm and food systems. 

But in spite of their dedicated efforts, gaps still exist.

This can be particularly true for BIPOC and immigrant farmers, who “may struggle with language barriers and legal status issues that affect their access to capital,” Brice said. 

But specialized entities, like the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, are combatting the problem by building deep connections within the agricultural community. One example is a partnership the organization created with New Hampshire’s Cheshire Conservation District and LFG to create the NH Farm Future Fund. 

“This program provides funding for farm viability planning in concert with the conservation of important agricultural soils,” Andersen said. The NH Farm Future Fund enables them to help NBFs put land into a conservation easement, which in turn can help reduce the cost of the land with easement proceeds. 

Business planning is offered in tandem to ensure long-term viability. It can be especially crucial for those without a farming background as they may be unprepared for the realities that lie ahead. 

“Farmers need finances to cover not only land, but equipment, infrastructure, and operational needs. …It takes time to build a business and have income in substantial amounts to cover all these aspects,” Brice said. 

To effectively address the challenges facing NBFs, a comprehensive approach is essential. “Farmers need a team who are collectively well-informed about local and regional conditions, including the location of farmland, methods for finding it, and the relevant policy landscape,” Brice said. 

Creative solutions are out there, like unique land leases and collaborations with municipalities or faith communities. Not to mention the option of connecting with a retiring farmer who’s preparing to transition. “This keeps active farmland in active agriculture and can sometimes ease the burden a brand-new, startup faces,” Brice said. 

It really comes down to the farmer’s goals and proposed model because every agricultural entity looks different. One of the NBFs Andersen worked with had financing needs to acquire a property. Through business coaching, the farmer developed a detailed enterprise analysis that enabled them to determine where to focus first to generate profitable income. 

Simultaneously, Andersen worked with them on a creative loan structure that enabled the farmer to make monthly payments while becoming established. “Having patience and flexible capital is crucial,” Andersen said.  

For New Hampshire farmer Andal Sundaramurthy, 10 years of patience was required before she ultimately signed a lease-to-own agreement. The LFG team first met her at a workshop about leasing farmland when she was still working as a farm employee.

Despite countless visits, calls, and letters to landowners, Sundaramurthy’s desired farmland did not surface. She even placed an ad in the local newspaper. “Eventually Andal found a 3-acre field owned by an open-minded couple who were supportive of local agriculture and willing to enter a new relationship with a young farmer,” the LFG website shared. 

An LFG field agent helped with drafting a custom lease, and today, Sundaramurthy is actively growing at her very own Nalla Farm. “Persistence is important. The process of finding and securing suitable farmland can be lengthy and challenging,” Brice said. 

But NBFs don’t need to undertake it alone. “By fostering these connections and resources, organizations can offer more comprehensive and sustained assistance to farmers navigating the complex landscape of land access and tenure,” Brice said. 

The post Persistence and Partnerships Both Key to Land Access for New and Beginning Farmers appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Charlotte Oliver is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.

SOUTH HERO — Ethan Wagner has been fishing as long as he can remember, mostly as a hobby. So when the Essex High School senior injured his knee playing football, he joined the school’s varsity bass fishing team. And among his teammates, who all call him Wags, he’s found a new bond. “When you’re on the boat together all day, you find something in common,” he said. 

Wagner competed on one of 19 varsity high school teams at the Vermont Principals’ Association’s seventh annual Open Classic tournament last Saturday, hosted at the John Guilmette Access Area in South Hero. The tournament was the most competitive yet, said Jeff Goodrich, chair of the association’s fishing committee — with more “‘full bags’ and competitive weights” than ever before.

It’s part of a trend in a new co-ed sport that’s only seen growth since it was trialed in Vermont in 2018, inspired by New Hampshire high schools, and made official in 2019. 

Kids go out on the water in the early morning, then parade back mid-afternoon. Boats are pulled out of the water and teams go up to weigh in the six best bass, smallmouth or large, they caught that day.

On Saturday, 34 boats went out on Lake Champlain, with 19 varsity and 15 junior varsity teams making up two divisions. Each school can have one team in each division, four kids to a team. The teens took shifts, allowing two in the boat at a time while a coach or volunteer captain maneuvered it. 

Milton High School came out on top that day, weighing six bass at 24.33 total pounds. Burlington High came in second with a weight of 20.97 pounds, and Champlain Valley Union High came in third with 18.28 pounds. 

The teams spent the day fishing on the Inland Sea of Lake Champlain, a stretch protected from wind and weather by the Champlain Islands and the causeway between Milton and South Hero. 

In Vermont varsity fishing, anglers must weigh in live fish — so all boats are required to have live wells that maintain temperature and oxygen levels to sustain the bass while on board. Teams get point deductions for any dead fish. 

At every tourney, employees from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife collect the fish in larger live tanks to release them after they’re weighed. The state workers make sure the fish are healthy and redistribute them, said Paige Blaker, one of three state employees working last weekend’s event. That afternoon, the crew released fish across three to four locations along the Inland Sea, Blaker said.

Part of the sport is “being a steward of the environment and taking care of the water,” Goodrich said, hence the partnership with the fish and wildlife department, which doesn’t exist in adult tournament leagues. 

Anglers master a tactic called culling: They weigh their fish as they go, dumping the lightest overboard and constantly replacing the ones in their on-board well until they’re left with the biggest six they can find. 

“You can control a lot of things — but the one thing you can’t control is if the fish is gonna bite,” said Scott Green, the coach at Harwood Union High School. The team at Harwood, last year’s state champs, has 18 anglers, the most ever. 

How do they prepare for tournaments? 

“We make sure there’s no frays in our line,” said team captain Nathanael Conyers. 

At the Duxbury school’s last practice ahead of the Open Classic, Green set up cornhole boards and cut-up recycling bins on the lawn in front of the school — targets for the athletes to try to land their hooks on. The team was working on their line-casting skills in preparation for the tournament in a few days. 

The rod is an “extension of your hand,” and “your wrist dictates where it goes,” Green said. 

The team gets in two practices on the lawn during the week — due to the long drive to the lake — and one on the water every weekend. Like all school teams in the state, Harwood Union relies on local anglers and coaches to volunteer personal boats, paying for insurance and fuel. 

Other schools far from the lake, like Middlebury Union High School, practice on the water only a couple times a year, said John Fitzgerald, that team’s coach. Other than with those sporadic sessions, he helps his anglers by directing them to YouTube and online resources to learn about “different setups,” he said. 

Although the sport is co-ed in Vermont schools, girls are far outnumbered. Hailey Isham, a sophomore at Mount Abraham Union High School in Bristol, said she’s the only girl on her school’s team. She’s been doing the sport since she was a freshman and plans to participate all four years. 

The Harwood team has only had a few girls over the years, Green said. The Middlebury team had a girl on the team last year, though none this year, Fitzgerald said.

But Green said he’s happy to have girls on the team, and leaders in the sport emphasize it’s for everyone.

“It gets students an opportunity to be a part of their school community, wear the uniform and represent their school in a nontraditional fashion,” Goodrich said. 

Wagner from Essex High said he’s excited for the VPA State Championship on Oct. 5 and hopes his team will do better there than at the South Hero tournament.

“I don’t do anything in my life to lose,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont high schools hooked on a new sport: bass fishing.

In rural Kansas, if you’re between the ages of 21 and 39ish, you might be considered a PowerUp —  but not just because of your age or location. A PowerUp is someone who is rural by choice. 

“The name was created to illustrate the goal of empowering and moving younger people in rural communities into positions of leadership and influence,” Simone Elder said. 

She is the PowerUp & Engagement Manager for the Kansas Sampler Foundation (KSF), which focuses on preserving and sustaining rural culture. “For years, returning to rural has gotten a bad rap — the perception that it’s less than or someone failed at their bigger endeavors elsewhere,” Elder said. But KSF has been working to shift that mindset. 

Despite old narratives about small towns being places to escape, grassroots leaders and policymakers in rural communities nationwide are exploring ways to attract young people to these places and make them feel at home there.

For example, KSF is challenging residents to envision new possibilities by getting out on the back roads to experience overlooked assets in their hometowns. “Through the Big Kansas Road Trip, we help Kansans and other visitors from outside the state to see Kansas with new eyes,” Elder said. 

After identifying PowerUps as some of the strongest assets available, KSF has emphasized cultivating rural influencers. “There’s tremendous value in having an older person visibly and intentionally elevate the work of younger people in rural,” Elder said. 

Many PowerUps KSF has interviewed express wanting a sense of community, especially when it comes to raising kids, and a number have voiced entrepreneurial aspirations. Elder noted that while being rural by choice can mean loving where you live, it can sometimes feel lonely or frustrating. “It doesn’t mean you chose wrong,” she said. It’s about having a strong network of champions that can move forward together.

In neighboring Nebraska, Megan Helberg has become one of those champions. Fifteen years ago, she was a “returner.” Similar to Kansas, Nebraska was having an issue telling its own story. “We used to kind of joke about how small we were,” Helberg said. “But we started to realize that people listen to what you say.” 

Helberg, who decided to return despite that old narrative, is now a local rancher and secondary school teacher. She also sits on the Board of Directors for the Nebraska Community Foundation and serves as chairperson for the Calamus Area Community Fund. 

She is one of many spreading the message that young Nebraskans should go explore but then bring their greatness back. “We need you here, we want you here, and you can make a great life here,” she said. In 2024, her school’s senior class had six graduates, all of whom are heading off to college. But 75% are committed to coming back to help with an existing business or start one of their own. 

Creating the climate for those kinds of endeavors is where the community fund comes in, relying on unrestricted endowments, local bank accounts that accept donations from community members. Only the accumulated interest can be spent and all funds must be poured back into the community.

“It has been absolutely transformational,” Helberg said. In her area, the community fund has supported the renovation of neglected homes, making the properties available again to combat the housing crisis. Two new childcare centers have also opened with local support, as well as additional funding sources.

While these grassroots efforts show the power of community when everyone joins in, there is also critical work happening at the policy level across the country. New Hampshire-based Stay Work Play is a non-profit making it easier for young people to call the Granite State home. 

Part of its approach is non-partisan, issues-based advocacy informed by statewide data collection. Take, for instance, Stay Work Play’s Policy & Pints series, which gathered young locals at area breweries for focus groups to identify barriers to feeling welcome and secure in New Hampshire. 

Unsurprisingly, housing and childcare were high on the list. “We’re not experts ourselves in housing or childcare, but we do work with partners across the state for whom this is their business,” said Will Stewart, executive director. 

Stay Work Play is supporting greater investments in the state’s workforce housing fund and advocating for the ability to build smaller units on smaller lot sizes. “Things that young families need to get a toehold here in the state,” Stewart said. 

In addition, he’s seen “a return to older models,” like employer-supported housing. Some companies are paying existing employees to house new ones until they’re able to secure stable living situations. A leading healthcare provider has also been exploring options to develop on land already under its ownership. “But they’re just one example of a company that’s looking for novel solutions,” Stewart said. 

Beyond these logistical factors, social infrastructure is a key element that’s sometimes less talked about. In New Hampshire, young residents reported high satisfaction with “being able to get out of work and 30 minutes later be on the ski slopes or out hiking or on a paddleboard,” Stewart said. But making friends or finding a date can mean an ever-expanding search radius on social apps. The need for more “third places” where people can gather organically is strongly felt. 

As small towns rise to the challenge, sharing a new narrative through effective branding and marketing is essential. Stewart points to Littleton, a rural New Hampshire town that has cultivated a buzzing downtown, food and drink scene, and outdoor recreation network. 

For potential “returners” who may not have been back except for holiday dinners, “they probably don’t have an understanding of places, like Littleton, that have changed, and to use a scientific term, gotten cooler,” Stewart said. That’s an opportunity for a redefined rural place to find its people.

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Caroline Tremblay is a freelance writer who covers Radically Rural, an annual two-day summit on rural issues held in Keene, New Hampshire. This year’s event, featuring the people and organizations cited in this story, will take place September 25-26. For more information, and to register for this year’s summit, visit radicallyrural.org.

The post Young Americans Returning to Rural for More than Just Holiday Dinners appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Rural voters were slightly less likely than urban voters to support former President Donald Trump in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, a Daily Yonder analysis shows. 

The difference between Trump’s rural and urban support was slim but indicates that in New Hampshire, the rural Republican electorate did not skew disproportionately toward the former president compared to urban voters. 

Trump won the statewide contest by 11 points (54%-43%) over Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor.  

The former president won both rural (nonmetropolitan) and metropolitan counties, but the margin in rural areas was slightly smaller. Trump earned 53.4% of the vote in rural counties, versus 55.9% in the state’s three urban counties – a spread of 2.5 points.  

Haley won 44.7% of the vote in rural counties, versus 42.7% of the vote in urban counties. 

Although Trump’s margin of victory was slightly smaller in rural New Hampshire overall, his largest margin of victory came in rural Coos County, the northernmost county in the state.  

Trump secured 65% of the vote in Coos, beating Haley by a 28-point margin. Support for Trump among voters in rural Sullivan County, in the southwest, rivaled that of Coos County. Sixty-four percent of Sullivan County voters also cast their ballot for Trump.  

Haley performed the best in rural Grafton County, which borders Coos County to the south and is home to Dartmouth College. Fifty-two percent of Grafton County voters supported Haley over Trump on Tuesday night. Grafton was the only county out of New Hampshire’s 10 counties where Haley beat Trump. 

Methodology 

The Daily Yonder’s analysis of the rural vote is based on the 2013 Office of Management and Budget Metropolitan Statistical Areas definitions. Counties in metropolitan areas are classified as urban, and counties not in a metropolitan area (nonmetropolitan) are classified as rural.  

The post Trump Underperforms Slightly with Rural N.H. Voters  appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Her face solemn, Kati Preston held up a postcard-sized, black-and-white photograph, moving it slowly to face the 150 high school students spread across the lecture hall in New Hampshire. She wanted them all to see the image of her father, a handsome man in a dapper suit jacket, as she described searching for him with her mother at a train station in Hungary in 1945.

“We stood up on the platform,” Preston said, “and we were holding a picture of my father like this, saying to everybody who got off the train, ‘Have you seen this man?’ ”

Preston, then 6 years old, stood with her mother at the station in Nagyvárad, waiting for a train carrying Jews back from concentration camps after the end of World War II. They hadn’t seen her father, Ernest Rubin, for over a year. “The train emptied, and there was no Daddy,” Preston recalled. “My mother started to cry, and I cried.” The rapt assembly of students and teachers at Kingswood Regional High School in Wolfeboro listened in silence.

Preston and her mother returned to the train station the next day, holding up the photo again. This time, a man getting off the train walked up to them. “Don’t wait for him,” he said, explaining he’d been held prisoner in the Auschwitz death camp with Preston’s father. “He’s dead.”

Preston and her mother were the only ones among their 29 Jewish relatives to survive the Holocaust, the persecution and murder of 6 million Jews. The Nazis also killed millions of other people, including gay men, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war and people with disabilities. Preston’s mother was born Catholic and had converted to Judaism, so the Nazis didn’t consider her Jewish, only her daughter.

For more than a decade, Preston, now 84 and the author of the young adult graphic memoir “Hidden: A True Story of the Holocaust,” has been invited to 50 to 70 middle and high schools a year to share her story. She speaks primarily in New Hampshire, her home of 40 years. Last spring, she started becoming more political in her talks, especially about the dangers of staying silent when others are scapegoated. “Ten percent of people are
very good people, wonderful people. Ten percent are pretty awful. Eighty percent are sheep, and that’s what scares me,” Preston told the students at Kingswood Regional High. “It’s the sheep that allowed Hitler to rise.”

“It’s the sheep that allowed Hitler to rise.” 

Kati Preston, Holocaust survivor who lobbied for New Hampshire’s Holocaust education law

Preston speaks frankly about the politicization of history instruction. “You have to know your history to understand where you are coming from. Don’t let them distort it,” she urges the teens, whose school of around 700 students draws from a mix of towns — poor and wealthy, conservative and liberal-leaning. She cautioned them not to let people “change your laws to stop you learning about history.”

New Hampshire schools have become battlegrounds in the culture wars over racism and gender identity, and comprehensive education on the Holocaust is in danger, experts and teachers say. In 2020, after events including the mass shooting two years earlier that killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, New Hampshire passed a law requiring instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides in grades 8 through 12. But then, in 2021, as part of a backlash to the nation’s racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, New Hampshire banned the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as implicit bias and systemic racism.

Now these two laws are colliding in the state’s classrooms. Some of the topics that the divisive concepts laws restrict are precisely the ones that Holocaust education experts say must be covered to prevent a repeat of history. A key part of teaching about the Holocaust and other genocides is examining how one group of people could agree to participate in the mass murder of another. The answer, in part, lies in the use of propaganda that asserts one group as inferior. Adolf Hitler modeled his depiction of Jews as an inferior race on America’s racist treatment of Black people and the study of eugenics in this country.

Letters of concern to the New Hampshire Legislature and interviews with teachers reflect that, in teaching about the Holocaust, many feel scared to discuss certain topics as a way to draw contemporary parallels because of the state’s divisive concepts law.

Kingswood social studies teacher Kimberly Kelliher is among them. She says the state’s reporting mechanism for parents to accuse teachers of violating the law — plus a monetary award offered by the parent activist group Moms for Liberty aimed at encouraging such reports — frightens her. “The Holocaust is not a single event. It is a series of attitudes and actions that led to an atrocity,” says Kelliher, who has taught social studies for more than two decades. “When we look at the divisive concepts law, if we are denying people from talking about certain things, then we’re not honestly talking about the attitudes and actions.”

“The Holocaust is not a single event. It is a series of attitudes and actions that led to an atrocity. When we look at the divisive concepts law, if we are denying people from talking about certain things, then we’re not honestly talking about the attitudes and actions.” 

Kimberly Kelliher, social studies teacher, Kingswood Regional High School

Kelliher, like other teachers I spoke with, said she now avoids the word “racism” when talking to students about the Holocaust. Others say they avoid mentioning current events and hot-button topics such as implicit bias.

But a New Hampshire scholar says it’s impossible to avoid subjects like these if we truly want to learn from the atrocities of the past. “You can’t teach about Nazi perpetrators without teaching about implicit bias. You just can’t do it. What motivates the perpetrator?” says Tom White, the coordinator of educational outreach at Keene State College’s Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Hitler took advantage of implicit bias and conspiracy theories against Jews that had existed through thousands of years of antisemitism. “The central crux of fascism is to make their followers afraid that they’re under attack by another group, that they’re threatened by another group,” White says. “Implicit bias,” he adds, “is the crux of all of this.”

Preston advocated tirelessly for New Hampshire’s Holocaust education law. It mandated that beginning last school year, education on the Holocaust and other genocides start no later than eighth grade and be incorporated into at least one required high school social studies course. New Hampshire is one of 26 states with such a law, according to Echoes & Reflections, a Holocaust education organization. Massachusetts passed a law in 2022 establishing a fund to support genocide education and training; laws requiring Holocaust education now exist in every other New England state except Vermont, where it has been approved and is pending.

Under New Hampshire’s law, instruction must include facts about the Holocaust and other genocides, plus teach students “how and why political repression, intolerance, bigotry, antisemitism, and national, ethnic, racial, or religious hatred and discrimination have, in the past, evolved into genocide and mass violence.” Teachers, state Department of Education guidelines say, should help students “identify and evaluate the power of individual choices” in preventing such behavior.

Reports of antisemitic incidents and propaganda are on the rise nationally and regionally, according to the Anti-Defamation League of New England. In 2022, the nonprofit tracked 204 antisemitic incidents in New England, a 32 percent increase from the previous year. In New Hampshire, where 183 of those incidents took place, the spike of white supremacist propaganda activity included a classmate shouting antisemitic comments at a Jewish student; a swastika and the phrase “Kill all Jews” scrawled on a rock in a public place; and a neo-Nazi group distributing stickers with the Star of David and message “Resist Zionism.”

In 2021, a year after New Hampshire’s Holocaust and genocide education act became law, the state Legislature tucked into its budget bill an unrelated provision called “Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education.” Known informally as the “divisive concepts law,” it’s part of a wave of “anti-woke” legislation around the country that right-wing backers have identified as a way to politically capitalize on white resentment and the concern by some people that white children are being made to feel guilty about segregation and other past racial injustices.

The divisive concepts law in New Hampshire prohibits students from being “taught, instructed, inculcated or compelled to express belief in or support” that someone is “inherently superior” to another based on a particular trait, including sex, race, and religion, and also states that students cannot be taught that an individual is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Educators who run afoul of this provision can face sanctions, including loss of their teaching licenses.

“The whole concept of race superiority and guilt over the past is concerning.”

Republican state Representative Glenn Cordelli, vice chair of the House Education Committee, who cosponsored New Hampshire’s initial divisive concepts bill

Republican state Representative Glenn Cordelli, vice chair of the House Education Committee, cosponsored New Hampshire’s initial divisive concepts bill, which failed to pass as a standalone law. I met him for breakfast at Katie’s Kitchen in Wolfeboro in March. A soft-spoken 74-year-old, retired from a career in information technology, he lives in Tuftonboro, a feeder town for Kingswood High. His inspiration for the measure had come from a 2020 executive order signed by then-President Trump (later rescinded by President Biden) prohibiting federal funding for training that promotes the concepts, as the executive order put it, “that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”

Cordelli told me he was concerned about teachers indoctrinating students and schools promoting critical race theory. That legal theory, which emphasizes that racism is systemic and therefore embedded in US policies and programs, has been a focus of the latest wave of conservative attacks on public education, even though it’s not commonly taught in K-12 schools.

“The whole concept of race superiority and guilt over the past is concerning,” Cordelli said, citing a complaint and resignation from a Manchester public school employee over training that discussed white privilege. (“I question,” Cordelli added, “whether there is systemic racism in New Hampshire.”)

Cordelli, who voted for the Holocaust and genocide education requirements, thinks teachers should not make direct connections to ideas such as implicit bias or systemic racism when teaching about the Holocaust. Rather, he believes that in open discussion, students can connect the dots between the past and present themselves without their teachers drawing conclusions for them.

He emphasized that the Holocaust education law and the divisive concepts law are not in conflict with one another. No one testifying before the education committee had “link[ed] instruction of the Holocaust with the divisive concepts bill” before it passed, he said. “That has not come up as an issue for teachers.”

But teachers and others around the state disagree with that point of view. The state’s two largest teacher unions are suing the New Hampshire education commissioner, the attorney general, and the head of the human rights commission to repeal the divisive concepts law, citing the chilling effect it is having on teaching. Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers-New Hampshire, says the law’s title, which includes the words “Right to Freedom from Discrimination,” is downright Orwellian in its doublespeak, given the law itself “is in effect chilling speech on the very concept of discrimination against various marginalized groups.”

“The divisive concepts law is so broadly worded. None of us are teaching that anyone deserves to be inherently oppressed, but we also know that when you’re talking about either history or the impact of history on current events, there are people who are oppressed and it comes from somewhere.”

Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers-New Hampshire

The vagueness of the divisive concepts law is one of teachers’ biggest concerns, Howes adds. “The divisive concepts law is so broadly worded. None of us are teaching that anyone deserves to be inherently oppressed, but we also know that when you’re talking about either history or the impact of history on current events, there are people who are oppressed and it comes from somewhere,” she says.

Many teachers I spoke with worry about parents reporting them. Some have seen this atmosphere building for years. One New Hampshire assistant principal recalled an incident from more than a decade ago that happened to her while she was teaching: a parent overheard her say the word “Nazis” and reported her to the principal. But she was, in fact, leading a lesson about the diary of Anne Frank.

In November of 2021, the New Hampshire chapter of the group Moms for Liberty tweeted an offer of a $500 bounty to the first person who caught a teacher breaking the divisive concepts law. Tiffany Justice, the Florida mother of four who cofounded Moms for Liberty, emphasizes that her group targets the teaching of CRT, and the divisive concepts law has no effect on teaching about the Holocaust. “The idea the Holocaust couldn’t be taught in its entirety with all honest truth is a ridiculous thought,” she told me. “This is a manufactured argument.”

In November 2021, New Hampshire’s education department posted an online form for people wanting to lodge complaints against teachers. Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut was concerned about teachers “trying to impose a value system on impressionable youngsters,” according to an April 15, 2022, news release (Edelbut declined to comment for this article through a spokesperson).

Since November of 2021, only one charge related to the divisive concepts law has been filed against a teacher, the state said in response to a Hechinger Report/Boston Globe Magazine public information request. (The state human rights commission, which fields complaints against teachers under the divisive concepts law, declined to provide further information, citing its confidentiality rules regarding complaints.)

Meanwhile, many school districts, including Governor Wentworth Regional School District, where Kingswood is located, have received freedom of information requests from people wanting to know if particular books were being used and asking to see all curricula or teaching materials with particular words, including “justice” and “diversity.”

“Clearly, there are individuals and groups that are racist, homophobic, misogynistic. We can’t call them out for it?”

New Hampshire State Representative Peter Petrigno

In January, Democratic lawmakers in New Hampshire proposed a bill to repeal the divisive concepts measure, citing the chilling effect and the upheaval the current provision has already caused among educators. “I’m a German historian,” said state Representative Nicholas Germana, a professor at Keene State, during a public hearing earlier this year. “I can’t imagine for the life of me that a [measure] like this would be introduced in Germany today.”

In March, the proposed repeal died in the House. State Representative Peter Petrigno, its prime sponsor and a Democrat, said he was doubtful it ever would be passed, given the Legislature’s Republican majority, but he pledged to keep trying. “Clearly, there are individuals and groups that are racist, homophobic, misogynistic. We can’t call them out for it?” says Petrigno, a former social studies teacher. “I don’t know how you can have a lesson on the Holocaust and genocide and the issue of racism can’t come up. Inevitably, it’s going to.”

In her talks, Preston first paints a picture of a happy, privileged life in early childhood, then, little by little, unspools how she, as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Hungary, lost every right she had — and nearly her life. It’s a real-life lesson on racism — the Nazis considered Jews a race — against one group of people.

In 1944, when Hungary fell under German occupation, Preston was weeks away from turning 5. Preston’s father ran a wholesale fish business and often brought a fresh carp home for dinner, putting it in the bathtub to keep it cool. The young Preston would visit the fish there, she remembers. “I would say, ‘Look, I’m so sorry we’re going to eat you, but you’re going to taste so good,’ ” she told the Kingswood students, sparking laughter. Preston recalls, too, the joy of regular visits by her father’s relatives. “I basked in this wonderful love of all of these people.”

Change happened gradually at first. The Nazis began prohibiting Jews from going to school or work, and then other places. “There was a special bench with a yellow stripe on it, and it said ‘Jew,’ ” she tells students. “I could no longer go to the swimming pool with my daddy because that would be ‘contaminated’ by us.”

Roundups of Jews began, and her father and all of his relatives were taken to a fenced-in ghetto. Preston was supposed to go, too. At first, her mother hid her at home. Then a dairy farmer, grateful to Preston’s mother for making her wedding dress, offered to hide the girl in her barn, taking her there in a farm cart. One day, soldiers came and Preston heard them say to her rescuer, “Where’s the Jew? We have information you’re hiding a Jew.”

“I open my eye and a big black boot is right next to my head, and then a bayonet comes down an inch away from my head and gets stuck in the wood next to my face. Then he pulls it out and they leave. That’s somehow when my real childhood ended.”

Kati Preston, Holocaust survivor who advocated for New Hampshire’s Holocaust education law

After searching the house, the soldiers headed to the barn and climbed up to where Preston had buried herself under hay. “I open my eye and a big black boot is right next to my head, and then a bayonet comes down an inch away from my head and gets stuck in the wood next to my face. Then he pulls it out and they leave,” she recalls. “That’s somehow when my real childhood ended.” She stayed in the barn for three months until the war was over.

Preston and her mother learned the details of what had happened to her father from the man at the train station. After her father and another prisoner at Auschwitz stole a piece of bread, both were stripped of their clothes, beaten, put in a dog kennel, and left in a field.

“It took my father two days and a night to die,” Preston told the students, as one girl covered her face in horror.

That man from the station went on to marry Preston’s mother. A few years later, he told Preston how at Auschwitz, the Nazis had made him go in one group and his first wife and their daughter, 11-year-old Dita, were directed to another — the group that was sent immediately to be killed in the gas chambers. At her school presentation, Preston raised high a photo of Dita, a girl with long braids. “She was only a few years older than me, and this little girl was killed only because she was a Jew.”

The day after Preston’s talk at Kingswood High, Kelliher led a discussion about it in class. The 14 juniors and seniors sat in a circle as their teacher turned down the lights and said quietly, “Let your eyelids be soft on your eye- balls. Take a breath.” Moments later, she tapped a chime, then asked for their impressions of Preston’s presentation.

One thing really stuck with Tegan Perkins-Levasseur, he told his classmates: It took Preston 50 years to stop feeling her own sense of hate. “I have four sons,” Preston had recollected, “and every time I gave birth to one of my sons, I was giving the finger to Hitler.” Perkins-Levasseur added, “It really made me think she has such strength.”

Next, the teacher asked, “What contributes to people becoming the evil that Nazis were?”

Austin Johnson, a senior, said Hitler came to power at a time of economic woes for Germany. “When you have a leader that comes in and says, ‘Everything will be great,’ says, ‘We’re going to make this place great,’ you can get an entire country to do what he wants,” he said. Another student, Gabe Hibbard, offered, “One of the factors was really the propaganda and teaching the Nazis that ‘hey, it’s OK to bully Jews.’ ”

Kelliher nodded, and then she asked, “Are there parallels to this in the world today?”

This is as close as Kelliher would get in class to connecting the Holocaust to today. She offered no answers to her question, and students did not latch onto it. Kelliher moved on.

“It really has had a chilling effect on teachers new to the classroom, especially teachers who may not have knowledge on teaching about genocide. What has happened is teachers are saying they’re not going to teach it at all.” 

Evan Czyzowski, a Bedford, New Hampshire, high school teacher

After class, Kelliher said the divisive concepts measure was on her mind as she taught. “It’s just a little more pressure on the words I choose.” Rather than risk a parental complaint, she puts the burden on students to bring up concepts such as systemic racism. She resents the threat hanging over her while she teaches. “It’s the stress of having to manage all of this and making sure that you’re educating them in a way that they need to be educated about these topics.”

Unlike Kelliher and some of her other colleagues, one Kingswood social studies teacher I interviewed supported the divisive concepts law and said it did not affect his teaching. He did not want his name used, partly because his view of the law is unpopular, particularly among other educators. Teachers should “stick to the facts” and help students develop the skills to reach their own conclusions, he said. “I think the kids are sophisticated enough to make the connections.”

Nicholas Germana, the German history professor and state legislator, disagrees that students will make the connections. Without teachers to help connect the dots between the past and today, he fears studies will make incorrect inferences, or draw no conclusions at all, he says. And yet helping them make such connections is “exactly the kind of thing you could lose your teacher’s license over.”

Elements of totalitarianism are not new in the United States, says Germana, noting that in the 1930s, the German American Bund organization, a U.S. group supporting the Nazis, held a rally at Madison Square Garden with a picture of George Washington and the Nazi swastika on display. The America First movement was founded in 1940.

“[The America First movement] is associated with things Trump talked about when he be- came president . . . the Muslim ban, the birther lie about President Obama, and the cozying up to strongmen like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Germana says. “You put yourselves in a dangerous situation of thinking those forces are still not present in your society.”

The Proud Boys, a far-right group with leaders among those convicted of plotting the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is one such example, Germana says. “You can compare Proud Boys to the creation of terrorist political cells in Germany. When you see the normalization of violence [today], the parallel between now and the 1920s is frightening.”

At a January 20 training on Zoom for about 24 teachers from around New Hampshire, Tom White of Keene State tried to reassure teachers that New Hampshire’s Holocaust education requirements permitted them to talk about political oppression, bigotry, and implicit bias, despite their fears. “What I’m trying to argue today is you are safe in dealing with difficult topics,” he said, though he went on to add that it didn’t mean pressure will not come from particular groups that traffic in fear and intimidation.

He played a video clip of a teacher in Germany talking about her country’s commitment to teaching schoolchildren about the Holocaust to prevent genocide from repeating. “I also want Americans to think about what they would say if Germany all of a sudden decided ‘OK, we’re no longer teaching [about] Nazi Germany in schools because it’s too difficult for children to learn about that at age 10,’ ” she said in the video. But learning at age 10 that her grandparents’ generation and people she’d known or loved had helped perpetrate the Holocaust did not traumatize her, she continued. Instead, it made her a more politically aware, informed citizen.

Despite White’s reassurance, some teachers at the workshop said they remain afraid and struggle with how to have difficult conversations with students. One teacher spoke of an administrator accusing her of promoting a liberal agenda; others said their administrators had given little or no guidance on how to deal with the divisive concepts law and its fallout. “It really has had a chilling effect on teachers new to the classroom, especially teachers who may not have knowledge on teaching about genocide,” said Evan Czyzowski, a Bedford, New Hampshire, high school teacher who co-taught the workshop with White. “What has happened is teachers are saying they’re not going to teach it at all.”

“If we’re learning about the Holocaust but not thinking about how that should inform our future decision making, what’s the point of learning about it? If it’s something bound in the past that has no relevance to today, I think we’re missing the point.” 

Sean O’Mara, a social studies teacher at Keene Middle School

At the workshop, Morgan Baker, a teacher at Conant Middle High School in Jaffrey, sought advice from White. “You used the phrase ‘systemic racism.’ If I’m being honest with you, that’s not a phrase I’m comfortable using in my classroom,” said Baker, who said students have come into his classes carrying Confederate flags or displaying it on T-shirts or hats. “I’m a new teacher . . . It’s a lot to wrap my head around. How do I do this without dealing with a lot of backlash?”

In his answer, White shared an anecdote about a ninth-grade student who shouted “Proud Boys Rule!” in the middle of a lecture on the Holocaust at a New Hampshire high school. When White asked the student why he felt that way, the student explained why he thought the Proud Boys were important and that he disliked Biden, alleging that the president was a pedophile.

Eventually, White recognized that the student had misinterpreted a photograph — popular in online conspiracy theorist circles — of Biden comforting his granddaughter at her father’s funeral. When White explained the picture, the boy was taken aback and pledged to remove his social media posts spreading the misinformation. White advised Baker to start a similar conversation with students displaying the Confederate flag.

After the workshop, Baker and his colleague Susan Graage, who teaches about the Holocaust in literature classes, tell me they appreciate White’s advice but remain worried. Some students will just blurt out “Hitler” and laugh, Graage says. “I feel like that didn’t happen 10 years ago.”

Teaching about racism in general is the main target of divisive concept laws, and the law has hurt attempts to teach about hate in all of its forms, New Hampshire teachers told me in interviews. An English teacher at Kingswood, Sarah Straz, says some community members’ right to know requests searching for references to diversity and related topics have instilled fear in some teachers. And yet, she says, in a predominantly white school like hers, it should be an imperative to make sure the students know about the historical oppression of African Americans and how it relates to today.

At least six other states have both Holocaust education mandates and divisive concepts laws, according to Jennifer Goss, program manager of Echoes & Reflections. Despite assurances to the contrary, she believes the laws, in addition to negatively affecting instruction on Black history, are leading to restrictions on Holocaust education. Several schools around the country, for example, have pulled a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” because of her ponderings about human sexuality and kissing a female friend, which critics describe as promoting a homosexual agenda. In Colorado, a state board member tried to remove the word “Nazi” from standards on Holocaust education to, as Goss says, “deemphasize the role of a nationalistic political party in the Holocaust.”

White himself has experienced resistance to language he has used. In April, after he spoke to the roughly 200 eighth graders at Keene Middle School, a parent complained to the principal that White referred to the Nazis as a right-wing movement and compared them with today’s Republican Party in America. The parent did not attend the talk and was basing the complaint on what their child had relayed. White says he didn’t make a comparison to the GOP, but that he had referred to the Nazi party as right wing because that’s a historical fact.

Sean O’Mara, a social studies teacher at Keene Middle School who attended that talk, frets about the current atmosphere’s effect on teaching history. “If we’re learning about the Holocaust but not thinking about how that should inform our future decision making, what’s the point of learning about it?” he asks. “If it’s something bound in the past that has no relevance to today, I think we’re missing the point.”

Kati Preston plans to speak at schools for as long as she’s able. She’s troubled when she hears about book banning, a hallmark of the Nazi regime. “It worries me because I see parallels,” she says. Still, the students she meets give her hope. Inevitably, moved by her words, some stand in line to meet her and exchange hugs. Some write letters: An eighth grader recently wrote her to say he was ashamed by some of his behavior and that her speech made him want to be a better person.

Some students, such as Tegan Perkins-Levasseur at Kingswood, seek her wisdom in the question-and-answer period after her talks. “What’s one thing you would tell the younger generation today about what happened back then?” he asked her at Kingswood High.

“I think I would tell them to get an education. The more you know, the less you fear. The less you fear, the less you’re violent,” Preston responded. “Most things happen because you’re afraid of the ‘other.’ I think education makes us more equal.”

This story on learning about the Holocaust was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with The Boston Globe Magazine. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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