Leandro school boards to seek rehearing from NC Supreme Court

North Carolina Supreme Court building closeup — Carolina Journal photo by Mitch Kokai

School board plaintiffs in the 32-year-old Leandro education funding lawsuit plan to ask the North Carolina Supreme Court for a rehearing. The high court issued a ruling earlier this month that effectively ended the case.

Five local school boards filed a motion Wednesday in a trial court to “stay the execution of the mandate” of the Supreme Court’s April 2 decision. The motion from the Cumberland, Halifax, Hoke, Robeson, and Vance school boards mentioned a “forthcoming petition for rehearing.”

“In light of the thirty-year history of this case and its great public significance, a stay pending a petition for rehearing furthers the public interest by demonstrating that the courts are taking care to resolve all aspects in an orderly and proper manner,” the school boards’ lawyers wrote.

“Moreover, because this case has been dormant before this trial court for several years, and the mandate does not relate to any injunction or enable the Defendants to move forward with a money judgment, a brief stay would not prejudice any of the Defendants,” the court filing added.

The state Supreme Court split, 4-3, in issuing its April 2 decision ending the 32-year-old Leandro case. The decision threw 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.”

“Leandro school boards to seek rehearing from NC Supreme Court” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.