Standing beside a dozen of his students in front of the New Hampshire State House on Wednesday, John Hart held up a sign: “Fund USNH schools.”

Hart, a concert band director at Keene State College, said he hoped Republican lawmakers would reconsider their proposal to reduce funding for the state’s university system by $50 million.

With cuts of that level, Hart, who has worked at Keene State for six years, said he fears there’s a “real possibility of campus closures.”

“The promise of their future is broken,” he said, waving toward his students, who cheered and held signs at the rally.

Around 300 people showed up in anticipation of the House of Representatives’ vote on the next state budget, which is set to happen on Thursday. Led by House Democrats, the crowd demanded the full restoration of funding for healthcare services, the arts and higher education, areas in which the Republican-led House Finance Committee has voted for cuts.

Democrats like Rep. Mary Jane Wallner of Concord plan to introduce their own version of what they call a “better budget” ahead of the vote. Their amendment would reverse most of the Republicans’ cuts.

Wallner said progressives based their alternate budget on revenue projections that are lower than Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s proposed budget but higher than that of House Republicans. It would restore funding levels for higher education, as well as several smaller agencies that the House Finance Committee voted to abolish, including the Office of the Child Advocate, the Human Rights Commission and the Council on the Arts.

The change would also maintain funding for nearly 100 positions in the state’s prison system that are currently in jeopardy. 

“I think what it really shows is that there was a better way to do it,” Wallner said. “There were options, and the Republicans did not move forward with those options.”

The Democrats’ so-called “better budget” amendment is unlikely to pass, though Wallner said she hopes some of her colleagues will cross the political aisle to support it. The removal of key provisions that the House of Representatives already approved, like the expansion of Education Freedom Accounts and local tax caps for school budgets, will be a hard sell to the Republican majority.

Republicans argue that extensive penny-pinching is necessary to save taxpayer money, but they don’t have the governor’s support in all those efforts. Ayotte said Wednesday she’ll be working with the state Senate to return some of her priorities – like increased funding for community mental health programs – to the budget.

“I spent a lot of time on my budget, and I wouldn’t have put it together if I didn’t think it was the right blueprint for the state,” Ayotte said. 

The cuts proposed by the House would mean diminished public services, ones that conservative legislators think the state can live without. While hammering out the budget, which slashes $643 million from Ayotte’s proposal, Republican budget writers said many of the smaller agencies they slashed were ‘wants,’ not ‘needs.’

“We have unlimited wants and we have limited resources, and that’s the environment we find ourselves,” Finance Committee member Jess Edwards said at the committee’s budget presentation to other lawmakers on Tuesday. “We’ve had to make priorities.”

At the rally, Springfield resident Steve Barker said he’s concerned about a loss in state funding for the arts and basic human services. He also blamed “GOP hypocrisy” for the need to cut spending. Republicans voted last year to retire the state’s Interest and Dividends tax, which brought in roughly $180 million in revenue in 2024.

“They’ve cut all the revenue, and now they’re complaining that there’s no money in the budget,” Barker said. As he sees it, that leaves just one option.

“The people are gonna pay,” he said.

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.