This week, the New Hampshire House Education Policy and Administration Committee heard testimony on whether the state should withdraw from the Multi-Tiered System of Support for Behavior.
Some school staff showed up to oppose this legislation and explained how these mental health practices are working well in their schools. But this legislation wouldn’t end that they can certainly use more taxpayer money to run a mental health clinic inside your school. The legislation would simply end the state participation in the program.
Why would we want to do that?
This is testimony I provided to the House Committee. None of these problems were mentioned by those who opposed the Bill. They left all of this out, leaving the committee believing that everything is working well. It is NOT working well.
I would suggest everyone send an email to the Committee and ask them to support HB1574. Emails will be provided at the bottom of this post:
Honorable Chair and Members of the House Education Policy Administration Committee
My name is Ann Marie Banfield and I am a parent advocate focused on excellence in education. Today I come here in support of HB1754.
Why MTSS-B Should Be Removed from New Hampshire Law
Teachers have always supported students’ social and emotional needs. Long before MTSS-B existed, educators built relationships, set boundaries, enforced discipline, and referred families to appropriate outside services when genuine mental health concerns arose. What has changed is not the concern for children—but the scope, authority, and data practices embedded in the Multi-Tiered System of Supports–Behavioral (MTSS-B) now codified in New Hampshire law.
MTSS-B is no longer a simple framework for helping struggling students. As implemented, it functions as a state-sponsored behavioral health system embedded inside public schools, operating with insufficient parental consent, inadequate privacy protections, and unclear professional boundaries. For these reasons, MTSS-B should be removed from New Hampshire law.
MTSS-B Redefines the Role of Public Schools
According to the New Hampshire Department of Education, MTSS-B blends research-based school mental health practices and social-emotional learning with Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS).
This blending is the problem.
Public schools exist to provide academic instruction. Mental health care—especially diagnosis, assessment, treatment, and data collection—belongs in the medical and clinical domain, governed by licensing laws, informed consent, HIPAA standards, and ethical review boards. MTSS-B collapses these distinctions.
Tier 1: Mandatory SEL for All Students
Under MTSS-B, Tier 1 requires Social and Emotional Learning (SEL for every child)—not just those who need extra support.
This raises several concerns:
- Instructional time is diverted from core subjects such as math, reading, science, and history—particularly harmful in districts with chronically low proficiency scores.
- Emotional disclosure is coerced, not voluntary. Children have reported discomfort when asked to share feelings in group settings.
- Emotional growth is inherently subjective, often assessed by staff without clinical training.
- Teachers are not therapists, yet are placed in situations involving emotional disclosures they are not qualified—or ethically permitted—to handle.
Most troubling, SEL is increasingly embedded in academic software, including math curricula.
SEL Embedded in Academic Technology
Programs such as Eureka² Math, used in New Hampshire districts including Merrimack, integrate SEL into instruction. This allows ed-tech vendors to collect emotional and behavioral data under the guise of academic content.
This is not a hypothetical risk.
Data Privacy Violations Are Not Speculative—They Are Documented
The PowerSchool Lawsuit
A pending class action lawsuit against PowerSchool Holdings, Inc. alleges the unlawful collection and monetization of sensitive student data without parental consent. While some claims were dismissed, others—including violations under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) and unjust enrichment—were allowed to proceed.
The plaintiff stated she:
- Was never informed of PowerSchool’s data practices
- Never consented
- Does not know what data was collected, how long it is stored, or who has access
PowerSchool is deeply entrenched in schools nationwide.
(See excerpt from lawsuit below)
Any SEL-enabled platform—especially those embedded in core academic software—raises identical concerns.
Parents are rarely informed:
- What data is collected
- Where it is stored
- Who accesses it
- Whether it follows the student long-term
This directly conflicts with New Hampshire’s recently adopted constitutional right to privacy:
Part I, Article 2-b:
“An individual’s right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.”
Tier 2: Mental Health Services Without Informed Consent
Tier 2 of MTSS-B involves targeted mental health interventions.
The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services explicitly defines Tier 2 services as addressing:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Aggressive behavior
- Substance use
These are clinical mental health conditions.
ESSA Requires Parental Consent—Period
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Section 4002:
A school must obtain prior written, informed parental consent for any mental health assessment or service funded under ESSA.
Yet testimony before the New Hampshire Senate Education Committee in 2024 revealed that:
- Social workers may assess students without parental consent
- Proposed legislation (SB573) was opposed by the Executive Director of National Association of Social Workers NH because it would have a “chilling effect” on such practices
That is not a policy disagreement—it is an admission that federal law may be routinely ignored under MTSS-B.
If private practitioners violated these standards, they would risk loss of licensure.
Data Sharing with Third Parties Without Parental Knowledge
Under grants such as Project AWARE, personally identifiable student data was shared with Keene State’s Behavioral Health Innovation Institute (BHII) via cloud-based platforms.
Parents did not consent to this data sharing.
This raises urgent questions:
- Where is this data stored?
- Who has access?
- Is it ever destroyed?
- Are psychological profiles being created on children without consent?
This is incompatible with:
- Ethical research standards (APA Ethics Code)
- The Belmont Report
- IRB requirements
- New Hampshire’s constitutional privacy protections
Discussion among Keene State BHII included shocking statements by school counselors supporting manipulating permission slips given to parents in order to secure their consent. Ethical conduct doesn’t appear to be a high priority.
Tier 3: Wraparound Services with Little Accountability
Tier 3 expands MTSS-B into outside service providers funded by taxpayers.
In Winnacunnet, students are diverted from discipline to third-party services at a cost of $90,000—while academic proficiency remains stagnant. Teachers reported that non-punitive interventions were often not taken seriously by students.
Key questions remain unanswered:
- How is success measured?
- Who evaluates outcomes?
- Can Medicaid or private insurance be billed instead of taxpayers?
- Why are academic failures tolerated while behavioral programs expand?
When I posed questions to the SAU21 Joint Board, no one responded with any answers. Transparency doesn’t seem to be a priority with MTSS-B either.
MTSS-B Replaces Discipline with Pseudo-Psychology
By reframing misconduct as therapy rather than behavior requiring consequences, MTSS-B undermines classroom authority. Teachers report worsening behavior—not improvement.
Discipline is not cruelty. It is structure. And structure is essential for learning.
Why MTSS-B Must Be Removed from New Hampshire Law
MTSS-B, as implemented, is:
- Unethical – violating informed consent norms
- Legally questionable – conflicting with ESSA and state constitutional protections
- Educationally unsound – diverting time from academics
- Professionally dangerous – placing educators outside their scope of practice
- Intrusive – enabling surveillance and data exploitation of children
If New Hampshire wishes to support student well-being, it must do so lawfully, transparently, and with parental authority at the center.
What Would Be Required Before Any Behavioral Framework Is Considered
If policymakers insist on retaining any version of MTSS-B, at minimum the state must require:
- Statutory privacy protections
- Absolute prohibition on ed-tech vendors receiving mental health data
- Clear legal definitions of qualified mental health professionals
- Oversight by a licensed PhD-level child psychologist
- Explicit, written parental consent at the state level
Until these conditions are met, MTSS-B has no place in New Hampshire law.
Public schools should educate—not surveil, diagnose, or experiment on children.
EXCERPT from Powerschool Lawsuit on “surveillance capitalism”
For two decades, vast numbers of consumer-facing technology companies built their businesses around what Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff has described as “surveillance capitalism.”2 20.
Under surveillance capitalism, a technology provider is incentivized to:
• collect as much data as possible about a user though the user’s interaction with the technology provider’s platform;
• use the data the provider collects about the user to make predictions about that user’s future behavior, which the provider uses to build its own products and services and sells to third parties seeking to profit from that user;
• surreptitiously influence the user’s behavior using what it knows about the user—both to keep the user on the platform longer (increasing the amount of information available to collect) and to coerce the user to act as the technology provider has predicted (increasing the value of the provider’s insights); and
• enable third parties to make significant decisions about the user that can affect their life and future
House Education Policy Administration Committee:
Margaret Drye <Margaret.Drye@leg.state.nh.us>,
Paul Terry <paul.terry@leg.state.nh.us>,
Loren.Selig@leg.state.nh.us,
LeeAnn.Kluger@leg.state.nh.us,
Steve Woodcock <Steve.Woodcock@leg.state.nh.us>,
Jeffrey.Tenczar@leg.state.nh.us,
Katy Peternel <Katy.Peternel@leg.state.nh.us>,
Valerie.McDonnell@leg.state.nh.us,
Megan.Murray@leg.state.nh.us,
Mike Belcher <Mike.Belcher@leg.state.nh.us>,
Melissa Litchfield <melissalitchfield@comcast.net>,
Jim.Snodgrass@leg.state.nh.us,
Muriel.Hall@leg.state.nh.us,
Brian.Nadeau@gc.nh.gov,
Lisa.Freeman@leg.state.nh.us,
Kristin Noble <kristin_noble1@yahoo.com>,
patricia.cornell@leg.state.nh.us,
Peggy Balboni <Peggy.Balboni@leg.state.nh.us>,
