A key NH GOP education bill collapsed on the House floor, and a lawmaker named in the leak said she would not run for another term—months after the high-profile Signal chat controversy.
A signature school-choice bill championed by House Education Policy and Administration Chair Kristin Noble (R) fell 16 votes short on the House floor in April, as 21 members of her own party crossed the aisle to kill the universal open-enrollment measure—a stinging defeat that the Union Leader characterized as “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Days later, Rep. Katy Peternel (R)—ssistant majority leader, and vice chair of House Education Committee announced she would not seek another term in the New Hampshire House.
Peternel announced the decision on her X account on Friday May 1, writing, “After much thought, I’ve decided not to run for re-election… Now it’s time to put my family back in the spotlight.”
The losses landed just months after leaked Signal messages from both lawmakers—first reported by Granite Post in January—calling for the segregation of New Hampshire schools drew national outrage and widespread condemnation as education leaders across the state called Noble’s fitness to lead the committee into open question.
A user bearing Noble’s name wrote in the leaked Signal messages in a private group chat of Republican legislators on the Education Committee, “when we have segregated schools we can add all the fun stuff lol” and “imagine the scores though if we had schools for them and some for us.” A video recording of the chat—provided to Granite Post by a source on the committee who wished to remain anonymous—also showed a user bearing Peternel’s name reacting to Noble’s segregation message with a laughing emoji.
Taken together, the two outcomes amount to the closest form of accountability for stateGOP lawmakers following the Signal chat leak, but has, until now, been largely met with silence from House Republican leadership, who took no formal public action against either lawmaker after the leak.
The 168–184 vote on Senate Bill 101, the open enrollment bill that was a top priority for state GOP lawmakers, was not close to political accountability in the conventional sense.
It was closer to accountability in a more damaging way: Republican leadership had the majority on paper, and lost it anyway. Lawmakers eventually lost the vote and then voted 320–32, with Noble’s caucus burying the bill rather than keeping it alive for negotiation.
For Noble, the Bedford Republican who has spent months shepherding open enrollment through her committee, the outcome is difficult to read as anything other than a stinging repudiation of her leadership. It is the kind of defeat committee chairs are appointed to prevent.
Fourteen of the 21 Republican no votes came from a single county: Rockingham. Two of them were committee chairs themselves—Rep. Terry Roy of Deerfield and Rep. David Milz of Derry—joined on the board by Rep. Nicholas Bridle of Hampton and Rep. Susan Porcelli of Hampton Falls, among others.
Chair-on-chair defections are unusual in Concord. They are rarer still on a bill that leadership has identified as a session priority.
Noble said the messages referred to political, not racial, segregation—a clarification that many doubted and did little to quiet the reaction.
Democrats called for Noble’s removal from the chairmanship. The superintendent of schools in Bedford, her own district, publicly rebuked her vision for public education. Democratic Rep. David Luneau, ranking member on the House Education Funding Committee, called the comments “more than shocking. It’s disgusting.”
Whether the Signal episode directly moved votes on Thursday is impossible to say without members going on the record about it, and few Republicans are likely to do so.
But the episode reshaped the environment in which Noble had to sell legislation she had identified as a priority, and now has the potential to stain the reputations of lawmakers who would support her priorities.
On the floor before the vote, Noble framed the bill as a measure of care: “This is not about dismantling public education; it is about strengthening it. It is about a student who would be safer or more supported in another school.”
The defense of the committee’s process fell to Peternel, who noted that members had spent 15 hours working on the measure and said the final product had been “carefully crafted to address concerns raised about the original measure.”
Notably absent from post-vote coverage was any public statement from Noble herself. By Friday morning after the vote, the loudest Republican voice on the defeat was not the committee chair but a rank-and-file member defending the committee’s work. Democrats, for their part, read the outcome as a reflection of the bill rather than the chair.
“People realize that for voters across the state, this is massively unpopular,” said Rep. Dave Luneau, (D-Hopkinton).
Open enrollment is not dead because another similar measure could still move forward.What is harder to restore is the standing of the committee chair who could not deliver her chamber, and the political career of the assistant majority leader who reacted with a laughing emoji.
Noble entered this session as the public face of the majority’s education agenda. She now is poised to exit having lost her signature bill and without, as of this writing, a word on the defeat. Peternel, by her own announcement, will not be back to defend the next one.
