NC Supreme Court ends 32-year Leandro school funding case
The North Carolina Supreme Court has split, 4-3, in ending the 32-year-old Leandro school funding case. The decision Thursday throws out a lower court ruling that would have led to $677 million in new court-ordered education spending in the state and could have led to billions more.
The high court rejected a trial judge’s April 2023 decision ordering the additional state education spending. That spending was tied to a court-endorsed program — the comprehensive remedial plan — that called for billions of dollars in court-ordered funding in years ahead.
Republican state legislative leaders challenged the 2023 ruling. They said the trial court lacked “subject matter jurisdiction” to issue its order.
“In this case we resolve whether the trial court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to enter its order of 17 April 2023,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote in the lead opinion. “To do so, we must consider what happens to a case when the original claims have been transformed into claims very different than those in the pleadings. In other words, can a party completely change the subject matter of its action without following the proper procedure for invoking the trial court’s subject matter jurisdiction over a new, very different claim?”
“We conclude that the answer is no,” Newby wrote. “Rather, litigants are required to properly invoke the trial court’s subject matter jurisdiction over claims they want resolved. If litigants do not do so, the trial court lacks subject matter jurisdiction to adjudicate the claims.”
The Leandro case started in 1994 with students, parents, and school boards in five low-wealth school districts suing the state for additional funding. The case changed over the next three decades, including the addition of plaintiffs from six urban school districts.
Newby focused on a July 2017 court filing from then-Attorney General Josh Stein, which “highlighted that the original claims, which were stated in the pleadings and refined by this Court’s decisions, were no longer the focus of this case.”
“The subject of the original complaints — the education system of the 1990s and early 2000s — no longer existed,” Newby wrote. “The litigation had instead become a statewide challenge to a ‘future school system,’ exceeding the jurisdiction of the original pleadings. Therefore, the Attorney General argued that the trial court did not have jurisdiction to address this question.”
“We agree,” the chief justice wrote. “By 24 July 2017, the remaining participants in the litigation and the trial court officially transformed this case into one addressing matters never pled. Specifically, the trial court worked with the remaining parties in this case — while excluding the General Assembly — to enforce a statewide plan that overhauled the legislatively enacted educational system. What began as modest, as-applied challenges to the allocation of educational resources in the named school districts became a full-scale, facial assault on the entire educational system enacted by the General Assembly.”
“When this case ceased to be about the as-applied claims raised in the complaints and refined by this Court’s decisions, the trial court’s authority to hear the case likewise ceased,” Newby wrote. “No facial constitutional challenge was ever pled. What is more, this unpled facial challenge was not directed to the one tribunal empowered to address it: a three-judge panel of the Superior Court, Wake County. As a result, the trial court was without subject matter jurisdiction to consider that claim in the current case.”
“Consequently, we hold that any court decision entered in this matter after 24 July 2017 was entered without subject matter jurisdiction and is void ab initio, meaning it is ‘a nullity anywhere, at any time, for any purpose,’” Newby wrote.
The chief justice included his own court’s 2022 decision in the dispute, sometimes called Hoke County III or Leandro IV. “The trial court order of 17 April 2023 is vacated, and this matter is dismissed with prejudice.”
Dismissal with prejudice means the complaint cannot be refiled.
Newby wrapped up his opinion with a reminder of the state Supreme Court’s warning in its original 1997 Leandro ruling.
“Nearly thirty years ago in Leandro, this Court warned of the dangers that attend litigation concerning the right to an opportunity for a sound basic education, specifically forecasting ‘protracted litigation resulting in unworkable remedies,’” he wrote. “It is difficult to think of a more fitting description of what this case has become.”
Newby and Justices Trey Allen and Tamara Barringer supported the lead opinion. All are Republicans. Justice Phil Berger Jr., also a Republican, backed the majority on vacating all Leandro decisions since July 2017.
Yet Berger wrote a concurring opinion. “One could read the lead opinion and walk away believing that litigation designed to usurp the legislature’s exclusive power over education funding is finally laid to rest,” he wrote. “But before the ink is dry on this decision, countless lawsuits over education policy and funding will be filed across North Carolina because the lead opinion leaves the reasoning of Hoke III untouched.”
“Hoke III judicially amended our constitution and fundamentally changed the judiciary’s role in our constitutional system,” Berger added.
“To be clear, I would not write separately if the lead opinion simply read, ‘any order entered after that date, including the trial court’s decision of 17 April 2023 and this Court’s decision in Hoke County III, are void ab initio, and we expressly disavow the reasoning in Hoke III,’” Berger wrote. “Yet these words remain unsaid, and this Court passes on the opportunity to clearly reject Hoke III’s unconstitutional assault on the separation of powers and appropriations clauses.”
“Half measures will only ensure that we will be back here again with profiteering lawyers and constitutional evolutionists who fetishize a government of the judges, by the judges, and for the judges who can legitimately argue that the reasoning of Hoke III remains,” Berger warned. “For separation of powers stalwarts, this is a demoralizing head scratcher.”
The court’s fifth Republican, Justice Richard Dietz, dissented.
“There is an incongruity in this case that is too obvious to ignore,” he wrote. “The heart of Leandro is the notion of a sound basic education. But the Enlightenment principles that form the building blocks of that education — rationality, objectivity, tolerance, skepticism — have been abandoned by all sides in this long-running lawsuit. Instead, this case and the discourse around it have become a study in the opposite — partisanship, bias, generalization, straw-manning, and appeals to ignorance. Simply put, Leandro has lost its way.”
“I want to put it back on track,” Dietz added. “I see a path forward in this case that cures the State’s shameful failure to meet its constitutional obligations. But critically, that path also returns public education policy to the other branches of government, rather than resting it permanently in the courts.”
“The Court chose not to walk that path today,” Dietz wrote. “This is the end of Leandro as a lawsuit, but not Leandro as a promise to public school students.”
Dietz devoted the rest of his dissent to explaining a different way of moving forward. “In my view, the solution is procedural,” he wrote. “I would remand this case so that the parties and the courts can quickly take a series of process-related steps that correct the flaws in the earlier rulings. These steps would ensure that the final judgment in this case is an inclusive, lasting solution to the constitutional failings of public education.”
“A comprehensive, statewide remedy for these constitutional violations must include due process safeguards for the students whose rights are being vindicated; it must provide every interested party with a full opportunity to present their opposing evidence and views; and it must test competing positions in the crucible of adversity so that the courts can arrive at objective truth,” Dietz wrote. “The most recent Leandro decisions did not do this. But by innovating on the procedural tools at the court system’s disposal, we can fix these flaws and still reach a speedy resolution to this long-running lawsuit.”
Both of the high court’s two Democrats wrote dissents.
“Leandro I and our decisions that followed confirmed that the state Constitution’s establishment of a ‘general and uniform system of free public schools’ was meaningful and that state courts must safeguard adequate educational opportunities for all students — rich or poor, in urban or rural areas, and from all backgrounds,” wrote Justice Anita Earls.
“The Court today betrays these constitutional commitments,” she added. “The majority dismisses North Carolina’s landmark constitutional education rights litigation with prejudice and with no relief for any injured party because no plaintiff formally filed an amended pleading to challenge the current statewide funding system.”
“In other words, the majority concludes that it will not order the State to correct the way it has harmed public school students, even in very low-wealth school districts like Hoke County, and even as two previous Courts concluded that the State is failing to adequately educate students and must act to fix the public education system,” Earls wrote. “In reaching that decision, the majority relies on a hyper-technicality that is not even lawful grounds to dismiss these proceedings and was not argued by any party to this appeal. Specifically, no party asked this Court to dismiss this case because it was an improper ‘facial’ challenge.”
“The majority’s narrow holding rests on stunning and unsupported assertions about the nature of the schoolchildren’s and school district’s claims against the State, the history of this litigation, and the significance of recent changes to the public education system,” Earls added.
“Even as the majority vacates the trial court’s 2023 order, terminates this landmark litigation, and tries to rewrite the history of this case, it does not point to any evidence that the State has managed to finally meet its Leandro obligations or that the Plan is unnecessary. Nor could it,” she wrote. “The record shows that North Carolina’s uniform system of public education has moved even further away from the standards set forth in Leandro — even before the destabilizing effects of a global pandemic.”
“The State is not offering adequate educational opportunities to all North Carolina schoolchildren,” Earls’ dissent continued. “It is still true, for example, that over 7,000 classrooms in North Carolina’s public schools lack an appropriately licensed teacher, our State is next to last in per pupil spending, and there are significant achievement gaps between at-risk students and their peers from wealthier families. These disparities are exactly the challenges the Comprehensive Remedial Plan was designed to address.”
Justice Allison Riggs’ dissent focused on the two-year gap between oral arguments and the latest Leandro decision.
“Two timeframes bear remembering while reading today’s opinion and dissents: 771 days and 11,511 days,” Riggs wrote. “Today’s decision represents a sad day amongst the many days our state judicial system has allowed our children to languish in uncertainty and without the resources they need to start their lives as productive members of our society.”
“The first, 771 days, is the time it took for this Court to issue this decision, inexcusable in a matter of this importance,” Riggs continued. “The second, 11,511 days, is the time in which students, educators, and parents have sought to secure an important right: the right to a sound basic education for all North Carolina children. It has taken 11,511 days to resolve whether our courts would actually enforce that right or merely treat it as a parchment promise, worth no more than the paper on which it was written.”
“Our state’s children have already waited too long for their state government to provide them with the start in life that our Constitution promises them, and after making them wait even longer, this Court has now pulled the rug out from under them,” Riggs wrote.
“Today, this Court breaks a promise that constitutional drafters made to the people,” she concluded. “The majority discards our constitutional commitment to the children of the state instead of acting to meet it. The majority distorts the facts and history of this case, hides behind technicalities rather than addressing the core issue affecting our children, and looks for a reason — any reason — to ignore the problem instead of fixing it.”
“The majority’s message to our children is clear: pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but there is nothing this Court will do if the political branches never met their obligation to put boots on your feet in the first place,” Riggs continued. “But tides will change, voters will reach a breaking point, and hope springs eternal that democratic demand for a different species of Court will soon produce results.”
Justices heard 80 minutes of oral arguments on Feb. 22, 2024, involving the April 2023 trial court order calling for $677 million in additional state funding. That order was tied to a multiyear court-endorsed “comprehensive remedial plan” that eventually could have led to $5 billion or more in new spending.
State legislative leaders challenged the spending order. They argued that trial Judge James Ammons lacked “subject matter jurisdiction” to call for new statewide spending. It’s one of a series of orders lawmakers asked the Supreme Court to throw out.
“This is not a contest between those who want to fund education and those who don’t,” argued lawyer Matthew Tilley, representing state legislative leaders. “Instead the case is about whether the trial court, when presented with only district-specific claims, had jurisdiction to issue a sweeping statewide order — or statewide orders — that required the comprehensive remedial plan, a plan which dictates virtually every aspect of education policy and funding, not just for the districts that were plaintiffs, but for all 115 school districts across the state, effectively removing those decisions from the political and democratic process.”
Tilley argued that previous decisions in the long-running case, including a 2004 decision known as Leandro II or Hoke County I, limited the trial court’s jurisdiction to remedying problems with one school district.
Melanie Dubis, representing school board plaintiffs from Hoke and four other counties, criticized lawmakers’ arguments.
“At best, they reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the history and present reality of this litigation,” Dubis said. “At worst, they suggest a desire for further obfuscation and recalcitrance in lieu of remedying this decades-old constitutional violation. … They seek to drag the court into their gamesmanship.”
Dubis’ plaintiffs worked with lawyers from the state’s executive branch on the Leandro plan, which was based on a report developed by a San Francisco-based consultant called WestEd.
State Solicitor General Ryan Park, representing the executive branch, defended earlier Leandro-related decisions as “shining lights” in the state Supreme Court’s history.
The court’s two Democratic justices focused most of their questions on challenging Tilley’s arguments.
Earls focused on a portion of the 2004 decision.
“Where the state is saying to the plaintiffs, ‘We can’t solve your individual county problem because we have a constitutional mandate to provide equal educational opportunities to all students across the state,’ where the state takes the position, ‘We can’t just give you a remedy, Hoke County, we have to remedy the problem statewide,’ are you suggesting we also have to overturn what we said in 2004?” Earls asked Tilley.
Riggs questioned the idea that the court must limit its ruling to students in one county.
“Even if every single one of the 115 [local education agencies] are represented by parents or children, there is never going to be a situation where this court can say — because there are failures to provide a sound basic education — there’s never going to be a situation based on your theory of subject matter jurisdiction where we can force … tell the state you have to appropriate money to solve this problem, even if the trial court finds that lack of funding is what is leading to these Leandro violations,” Riggs said.
Three of the five Republican justices spoke during the hearing.
Allen asked both Tilley and Dubis to confirm that no current students are plaintiffs in the case that dates back to 1994.
“We made it crystal clear in Hoke [the 2004 case] that the right for an opportunity to a sound basic education is one that students possess and not school boards,” Allen said. “If there are no students left in the case, doesn’t that mean we have no parties left in the case that are entitled to relief?”
Dietz questioned Dubis about her school board clients, as agents of government, standing in for the people whose constitutional rights are at stake.
“I’m thinking about the students,” Dietz said. “This case needs to get to the outcome, which is to cure a very serious violation of the constitutional rights of students in our state. But one thing that’s awkward is that your client is the government. And it’s not just the government, but it’s the very government that’s violating the children’s constitutional rights.”
Dietz also questioned whether accepting the comprehensive remedial plan would shut the door on future lawsuits making Leandro-related claims.
“I’m just concerned that there are students that are out there who may say, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not fair that the government is the one that’s deciding this for me. I never got to come to court and say here’s how you fix my school,’” Dietz explained.
Berger cited High v. Pearce, a 1941 state Supreme Court precedent. “This court said where there is no jurisdiction of the subject matter, the whole proceeding is void ab initio and may be treated as a nullity anywhere at any time for any purpose,” he said.
A proceeding that is “void ab initio” is invalid from the start.
Both Berger and Earls took part in the hearing despite requests that they recuse themselves. Earls once represented one of the parties in the dispute. Berger is the son of the state Senate leader. Earls rejected recusal unilaterally. The court voted, 4-2, to allow Berger to take part in the case.
The state Supreme Court’s latest consideration of the education funding case resulted from an appeal from top legislators.
While many people refer to the case as Leandro, the last name of the original lead plaintiff in the 1994 lawsuit, lawmakers and Republican Supreme Court justices label the case “Hoke County.” A November 2022 decision from the state’s highest court is known either as Leandro IV or Hoke County III.
The state Supreme Court voted 5-2 in October 2023 to take another look at the case. That decision split the court along party lines. Republicans agreed to grant another review. Democrats dissented.
Earls explained in a dissent why she and Riggs would have rejected lawmakers’ request.
“Legislative-Intervenors’ bypass petition should be denied because it is substantively hollow and procedurally improper. This Court resolved the question of subject-matter jurisdiction in Leandro IV,” Earls wrote. “In that case — just 11 months old — the Legislative-Intervenors raised the same arguments they do in their bypass petition: That the trial court lacked jurisdiction to remedy constitutional deficiencies in public education. We examined that claim and ‘unequivocally rejected’ it.”
Earls rejected state lawmakers’ arguments that the case should focus only on Hoke County schools.
“Since the trial court found a statewide constitutional violation, we explained, it had subject-matter jurisdiction to order a statewide remedy,” she wrote. “But the Legislative-Intervenors ignored the trial court’s sound analysis and solid conclusion. They instead argued before us — as they do now in their petition — that ‘there has never been a finding’ of a constitutional violation ‘beyond Hoke County.’ We rebuffed that argument. And we went further, decrying it as ‘a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of this case and the State’s constitutional obligations.’”
“If parties can reopen a case by casting their disagreement in the language of ‘jurisdiction,’ then our courts will be nothing but revolving doors and our decisions nothing but paper tigers,” Earls wrote. “This case shows the danger of that approach.”
“We already grappled with and resolved the question of subject matter jurisdiction in this case — nothing imperils that decision or requires us to revisit it,” she added. “But by alchemizing its disagreement with Leandro IV into a ‘jurisdictional’ issue, the majority gives itself a tool to rewrite — and litigants to resist — our earlier decisions.”
A concurrence from Berger, joined by Dietz and Allen, answered Earls’ critique.
“The premise of the dissent is that this Court already ‘resolved the question of subject-matter jurisdiction in [Hoke County III].’ The dissent is wrong,” Berger wrote.
Berger noted Earls’ earlier work as a lawyer helping plaintiffs who wanted to add the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to the long-running case. The legal dispute had started with five different school systems.
“Core to their rationale for intervention was that every public school district faces its own unique educational challenges and groups of students or school districts in one area of our state are ill-suited to address the educational deficiencies in others,” Berger wrote.
“This raises questions that our Court has not yet addressed: If public school students or local school boards who are not parties to this case believe the remedial order does not sufficiently address the educational failure in their districts, are they bound by the remedial order?” Berger added. “If so, how were their rights adjudicated without their presence in the suit — an elementary principle of jurisdictional law.”
Berger wrote that Earls and the previous Supreme Court majority “rushed to complete its earlier opinion in this incredibly complex, novel case (one that has spanned decades) so that it could be released in November of last year [2022]. The failure to resolve these jurisdictional questions is not the first oversight from this Court’s rush to judgment in Hoke County III.”
“My dissenting colleague laments that subject matter is now being addressed because it will cause various harms to judicial integrity and ‘snuff out legal finality,’” Berger said of Earls. “Once again, we endure ad nauseum these fanciful protestations. But it is black letter law that courts cannot ignore potential defects in subject matter jurisdiction.”
“Even if we again failed to address jurisdictional concerns, these issues could be raised later in a collateral attack on the trial court’s order, causing tremendous chaos if steps are already being taken to execute the novel relief in the remedial order,” Berger warned.
“In its rush to publish an opinion in the prior matter, the majority declined to address fundamental subject matter jurisdiction questions,” Berger concluded. “To be sure, these issues were raised, but the majority chose to ignore the bedrock legal principle that courts must examine jurisdiction to act. Even legal neophytes understand that subject matter jurisdiction can never be waived and can be raised at any time.”
“Because these crucial issues of subject matter jurisdiction cannot be waived and must be addressed by this Court, it is a sound exercise of this Court’s constitutional role to take this case and permit the parties to brief the various issues.”
“NC Supreme Court ends 32-year Leandro school funding case” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.
![[WBT107.9FM] app promo graphics 2025](https://wbt.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/84/2025/12/17653898024341.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=150&crop=0,0,100,150px)
