House Bill 1635, prefiled in the New Hampshire House of Representatives on December 11, 2019, and referred to the House Committee on Education, would, if enacted, require climate education in the state's public schools, including a focus on anthropogenic climate change specifically. At the high school level, no less than ten hours of classroom time would be allotted to climate education per year, if the bill were enacted.
The bill was introduced by Chris Balch (D-District 38), joined by Kristina Schultz (D-District 18), Kat McGhee (D-District 40), John Mann (D-District 2), and Lee Oxenham (D-District 1). Balch explained the need to improve climate education to New Hampshire Public Radio (December 29, 2019), saying, "We need to have a common base of knowledge of what climate change is, how it works, how it happens, what we can do about it."
New Hampshire adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, which include global climate change as one of four sub-ideas in the core idea of Earth and Human Activity at both the middle school and the high school level standards for Earth and Space Sciences, in 2016, so climate change is presumably already taught. If HB 1635 were enacted, New Hampshire would become the first state to require the teaching of climate change by law.
