With no explanation, the wait for a Leandro ruling stretches past two years

Sunday marked two years since the Leandro school funding case was last heard in court, and the state Supreme Court still has not issued a decision.

The two-year wait is the latest delay in a case that already goes back to 1994 — and nobody really knows what the holdup is.

The court isn’t expected to release any new decisions until at least March 20, so that will likely be our next opportunity for a ruling.

Two years is a long time, so let’s put it in perspective. By some estimates, you could have left the courthouse that day, walked around the entire earth and come back, only to find there was still no decision.

But perhaps more relevant is this: In those two years, at least 215,000 students graduated from North Carolina schools, and as many as 20,000 students dropped out. Those are just some of the countless other students who have entered and exited the state’s public school system since the nearly 32-year-old Leandro case established in 2004 that the state was failing to provide the “sound, basic education” students are entitled to under the state constitution.

“Certainly in my experience and my observation of the courts over the time that I’ve been a lawyer, which has been since the early 1980s, I’ve never seen a decision take this long,” said Jane Wettach, a retired Duke law professor who’s filed briefs in the Leandro case. “You know, it certainly takes months, typically, to get a decision out of the Supreme Court. And sometimes, maybe it’s eight months or nine months, but two years is very out of the norm.”

So what exactly is the court deliberating on?

This complex case started in 1994, when five low-wealth school districts — Hoke, Halifax, Robeson, Vance and Cumberland County Schools — sued the state, arguing that it was failing to provide adequate funding for education.

The resulting case had several landmark moments. In 1997, the state Supreme Court found that all North Carolina students are constitutionally entitled to a “sound, basic education.” In 2004, the state Supreme Court again ruled on the case, upholding lower court rulings that found the state was not providing a “sound, basic education” to many students.

But defining a “sound, basic education” — and figuring out how to pay for it — was a trickier task, and for years, the courts wrangled with state officials to try and address the issues to no avail.

A ruling stalls

Back in 2020, lower courts ordered the state to fund a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar remedial plan, known as the Leandro Plan. It was prompted by a report commissioned by a third-party consultant called WestEd. Among other things, it would fund public pre-K expansions, increase teacher pay, and give more funding to districts whose students have the greatest need. You can read that plan here, and check out the WestEd report here.

Republican legislative leaders appealed to the then-Democratic-led state Supreme Court in 2022 and lost. But later that year, the court flipped to majority-Republican and agreed to reconsider the case. That decision was controversial in itself, as courts don’t often relitigate old decisions. But it led to the latest round of arguments in 2024. And that’s the decision we’re waiting for.

Now, to be clear, the specific dollar amount at issue here doesn’t account for the full plan. That was estimated to cost around $5.5 billion over eight years. But the amount that was up for debate in 2024 accounts for only a portion of the first couple of years of the plan – the amount by which plaintiffs argue those years have been underfunded, or about $677 million.

But the legal questions discussed in 2022 and again in 2024 don’t deal with the substance of the plan or the concept of a “sound, basic education.” They deal more with the court’s enforcement mechanisms — a question of whether the courts have the authority to order the funding at all.

Mitch Kokai of the conservative John Locke Foundation argues that the heart of this case is whether the courts can order the state to fund a statewide education policy without input from the General Assembly, outside of the normal legislative process. He points to one thread of this case, where the courts ordered the state controller to transfer the funding, though the controller's office has contended that it cannot do so without legislative approval.

“If the Supreme Court decides that the judicial branch could force the executive branch to move money without the legislature having any role, that would be a major shift in the separation of powers,” Kokai told me. “Because it could empower future judges to do something on other topics that are of interest but are not as top of mind as education funding.”

Others say the courts have to intervene because prior to 2020, judges in the case tried to push state leaders to solve this constitutional deficiency themselves without court intervention — to no avail.

“The courts have given the legislature and the executive branch nearly 30 years to make it right,” Wettach said. “And when we're in a situation where we've tried and tried and tried to give that power to allow those other branches to do what they are constitutionally obligated to do, and they still won't do it, the court has to step in.”

If there’s anything most agree on, however, it’s that two years is a long time.

“Typically, once you have oral arguments, if it's something that the Supreme Court can decide fairly quickly, you might see something within a matter of two or three months,” Kokai said. “If it's something that takes a long time, maybe six months, nine months, a year, more than a year. But to go for two years is really a long time.”

Kokai said when the court agreed to rehear the case with a new Republican majority, it was assumed that it would be a “fairly quick reversal” of what the previous Democratic-led court had done. But the longer the case goes on, it’s harder to guess what the Supreme Court might do.

“I would guess that maybe some of that is some division among the Republican majority about how best to handle this, because there are a number of ways they can do this,” Kokai said.

Funding in limbo

Meanwhile, education advocates say the General Assembly has ignored the court-ordered Leandro plan while spending money on things such as corporate tax breaks and vouchers for private schools.

“It’s the disinvestment in our public schools that is paying for the tax cuts for wealthy corporations and wealthy North Carolinians,” said Kris Nordstrom of the North Carolina Justice Center at a news conference last week. 

And now, they say the two-year wait is only denying relief.

“Thirty years is far too long to wait,” said Brooks Fuller of the group Common Cause North Carolina, speaking at a news conference last week. “Two more years is even worse to wait. Our students should not have to wait another minute for fair access to the sound basic education that every North Carolinian is entitled to.”

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering — when this decision comes, will Leandro finally come to an end? The legal experts I’ve spoken to tell me it depends on what the Supreme Court’s decision actually says.