Concord, New Hampshire locally owned, nonprofit, independent cinema in 2007. The SNOB Film Festival is one of the many arts organizations in the city. Other sites of interest include the Capitol Center for the Arts, the New Hampshire Historical Society, which has two facilities in Concord, the Steeplegate Mall on Loudon Road, and the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, a planetarium named after Christa McAuliffe, the Concord teacher who died during the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Concord's public schools are within the Concord School District, except for schools in the Penacook area of the city, which are within the Merrimack Valley School District,
Christa McAuliffe (1922–1990) of Irish descent and Grace Mary Corrigan ( 1924-2018 ) (née George), a substitute teacher, whose father was of Lebanese Maronite descent. McAuliffe was a great niece of Lebanese-American historian Philip Khuri Hitti. She was known by her middle name from an early age, although in later years she signed her name "S. Christa Corrigan", and eventually "S. Christa McAuliffe". The year she was born, her father was completing his sophomore year at Boston College. Not long thereafter, he took a job as an assistant comptroller in a Boston department store, and they moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, where she