We call on school committee members, school administrators, the Board of Education (BoE) and the Governor to join us and require the NH DoE immediately stop intimidating school administrators with the inexcusable action of pressuring school administrators to deny parents their fundamental rights.

School Administrators and teachers should never be pitted against parents in their own district and this is what is happening throughout New Hampshire. The NH DOE's position on this issue is concerning.

Our reasons for refusing the test on behalf of our children are based on informed and well-founded concerns with over-testing in our schools, use of new, unproven tests (SBAC), immense instructional time lost to test prep, data collection, excessive technological requirements for testing, developmentally inappropriate test questions, increases in test anxiety of children and implying the worth of our teachers can be boiled down to one test score.

We believe this petition is necessary based on the actions recently taken by NH DoE pressuring school administrators with technical advisories that do not inform administrators of a parent's right to refuse. We are extremely dissatisfied with the current leadership of DoE, including Virginia Barry. Our children are minors and we are their parents. We regret that NH DoE has made this critical error in judgment and has decided to become an adversary of parents instead of working together. We will not back down from this position.

We demand DoE publicly acknowledge parents’ rights to refuse the test for their child and not place parents against their school administrators when we refuse.