RALEIGH — In a Jan. 11 news release, N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein announced the filing of a brief in opposition to a discretionary review by the N.C Supreme Court of the long-running Leandro education funding case.
The N.C. Supreme Court granted a discretionary review of the case last October. The current dollar figure in the case sits at $677.8 million but has changed multiple times. The original funding amount suggested by the WestEd produced “Comprehensive Remedial Report” called for $8.29 billion.
“North Carolina’s children have a constitutional right to a sound, basic public education. Our General Assembly is failing them,” Stein said in the release. “This is the legislature’s latest attempt to shirk its responsibility to our students and avoid having to properly fund our state’s educational needs.”
“The court correctly ruled in 2022 that the state must implement a court-approved comprehensive plan to give all children the education our constitution promises,” said Stein. “Now, Republican legislators are asking the court to undo that decision – but the facts haven’t changed.”
Stein’s brief is 305 pages long, the bulk of which are exhibits and attachments.
“This Court should not countenance Legislative Intervenors’ latest attempt to shirk their constitutional responsibility,” Stein’s brief says. “The only issue this Court has agreed to review here is whether the trial court had jurisdiction to enter a statewide educational remedy like the Comprehensive Remedial Plan (CRP). It plainly did—and this Court said so just one year ago.”
The brief focuses on upholding the trial court’s April 14, 2023, decision has subject matter jurisdiction, bypassing the bigger issue at hand of the previously Democrat-dominated NC Supreme Court’s ruling that circumvented the powers of the General Assembly to make appropriations set out in the state constitution.
Legislative defendants in the case have argued that ordering the funding transfer from the state’s coffers by three other state agencies violates the appropriations clause.
The previous Democratic majority court had fast-tracked the case, delivering a 4-3 ruling just days before the court’s majority flipped to Republican in the November 2022 midterm elections.
Penned by Associate Justice Robin Hudson, the previous court’s order admitted the ruling was “extraordinary” because it “exercises powers at the outer bounds of the reach of the judiciary and encroaches into the traditional responsibilities of our coequal branches of government.”
