Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice Chairman, Members,

I write to you today as a taxpayer, a homeschooler, and an advocate for privacy rights.

In 2002, the NH Center for Public Policy drew new attention to the issue of dropouts from the public school system. In their report, "One in Four: School Dropouts in New Hampshire", they performed a valuable public service by re-evaluating the data available on graduation rates and putting it in a perspective that made us all realize how serious the situation is. Without being able to quantify them, the homeschooling community has long been aware of many of the problems outlined in the report of the legislative committee formed to study the dropout issue. A growing number of parents choose the home education option once they decide that attendance at a public school is no longer in their children's best interest, and they bring with them stories of the situations their children encountered.

As a taxpayer, I understand the need for accountability by those who, in my name, spend tax dollars. But as a homeschooler, I also know that only a tiny amount of tax dollars are spent on my home education program, overseeing my compliance with the home education law, and even then it is at the state's insistence, and not my own. (Believe me, if the legislature were to allow home education to exist without government oversight, I would be thrilled.) As a home educator, I take responsibility for my child's education, and the way in which I am held accountable to the state is, and should be, completely different from that for public schools. I create an outline of my program, and submit it to my superintendent to show that I am in compliance with the law. Each year I have an evaluation of my child's program performed at my own expense, and submit it to the superintendent.

As the accountability demands on public schools grow, I am concerned that they will spill over onto oversight of home education programs, and eventually make it more difficult for me to provide the kind of education which I believe best suits my child. This latest proposal, to create unique pupil identifiers and associate large amounts of personal information with them in a massive centralized database, has me especially worried. I would hope that the legislature concurs with me that the state has no need to hold me (or for that matter, non-public schools) to the accountability standards or mechanisms being set up for public schools, and I would ask you to make that clear. For that reason, I am proposing the following be added to SB333:

RSA 193-E:1

III. The provisions of this act shall not apply to students meeting compulsory attendance requirements by receiving home education under RSA 193-A, or by attending an approved private school.

or something to that effect.

I also have some concerns, as a privacy advocate, over the creation of such a database for public school students. I'm sure the legislature is aware of the growing problem of identity theft, and of the tragic case of Amy Boyd, who was stalked and killed when her ex-boyfriend was able to get private information about her and track her down. Children have a right to privacy, too, perhaps even more so than adults, as they are more vulnerable. Placing all the information in a central database makes the information accessible to more people; more records will be accessible by selected individuals, and any given record will be accessed by more individuals. In any security system, the human factor is always the weakest area. The increased risk of a security breach is inherent in the increased centralization.

Add to that the creation of a unique identifier…well, we all know that Social Security numbers, were supposed to be between the individual and the federal government, and used ONLY to track wages and SSI disbursements. They are now used for virtually everything under the sun, and there is a great deal of information linked to that number, so that unscrupulous people can know a great deal about an individual if they know that one number. Experience with unique identifiers shows that they rarely stay secret, and they are rarely limited to their intended use.

The legislature is being driven to mandate the gathering of more and more statistics by at least two factors outside its control: the state supreme court's ruling that the legislature must determine what constitutes an adequate education, and the school accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act. I would be fighting a losing battle if I asked the state to stop collecting data, but I can ask that the minimum amount of information is gathered to satisfy the state's interest, and that the data is gathered, stored and accessed in ways that protect the individual's right to privacy.

As someone with a computer background, I know that you can achieve almost all the desired results without centralizing the information and placing students' privacy at greater risk. Almost all the analyses of which I am aware could be run on data kept at the district level, and the results pooled at the state level, as is done today. The ONLY one that cannot is the issue of whether some older students who transfer really enroll in the destination school, or drop out at that point. I suggest to you that the solution to that single problem need not be as costly as the one proposed in the fiscal note of SB333. I am not an expert in distributed databases, but my husband who is VP of Engineering and Chief Technical Officer at a software company, assures me that a system operating on data kept at the local level could probably be achieved with an off-the-shelf distributed database and some conversion programs for a comparable or lesser amount of money. We also believe that the stated cost of a "Unique Pupil Identifier Engine" is greatly over-inflated, as algorithms for such things are well-known, and are taught in undergraduate programs in computer science.

Finally, I would like to put a different perspective on the priority being given to this project. I understand that there are funds available through the No Child Left Behind Act to pay for the proposal in SB333. Those funds, though significant, are not inexhaustible, and money spent on databases is money not spent on implementing changes that directly affect students. Do we really need to know if the dropout rate is 25% or 27%? There were many other worthy recommendations in the legislative committee's report. Think what a few hundred thousand dollars would do to advance them.

Respectfully,


Christina Hamilton