In 1987, the North Carolina Supreme Court, in Britt v. North Carolina State Board of Education, 361 S.E.2d 71, found that disparities in school programs and facilities did not violate the equal protection requirements of the State Constitution. Ten years later, however, the North Carolina Supreme Court held in Leandro v. State that the State Constitution required educational adequacy and that the State Constitution “requires that all children have the opportunity for a sound basic education.” The Supreme Court then remanded plaintiffs’ adequacy claims for trial.
Following the supreme court’s decision in Leandro I, the trial court determined that the case should be bifurcated into two merits trials, one for small-school district plaintiffs and one for the large, urban school district plaintiffs-intervenors. Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ. v. State, No. 95CVS1158, 2000 WL 1639686, at *6 (N.C. Super. Oct. 12, 2000), aff’d in part as mod., rev’d in part 358 N.C. 605 (2004). Given “the sheer size and complexity” of the evidence, the court decided to take evidence on one low-wealth plaintiffs’ district and one wealthy urban district; the court recognized that the issues affecting each individual small and large district were “similar” with the others in their respective classes. Id. The court selected Hoke County, and the parties consented; the large, urban district trial wasn’t to be scheduled until after Hoke concluded. Id. Hoke County was “the smallest and poorest” of the plaintiff districts and had been the plaintiffs’ chosen venue before the case was transferred to Wake County. Id. at 896. These reasons may explain the court’s decision.
The trial, in Hoke County v. State, 95 CVS 1158, held that performance “at or above grade level” is the minimum performance standard defining a “sound basic education.” North Carolina’s State Board of Education had developed learning standards based on the skills that students will need in order to be informed citizens and to be gainfully employed in contemporary society. The state had argued that performance one level below grade level in elementary and middle school and passing an eighth-grade level examination in high school should be adequate to demonstrate that students were receiving a sound basic education. The Court also required funding for pre-kindergarten for all ‘at-risk’ four-year-olds. Superior Court Justice Howard Manning ordered this remedy because he found that a lack of pre-kindergarten services rendered many of these students unprepared to enter public school, and that the constitutional sound basic education provision required the state to provide an opportunity for pre-school education for students from poverty backgrounds.
The North Carolina Supreme Court, in Hoke County v. State, 599 S.E.2d 365 (NC 2004) (“Leandro II”) agreed with the trial court in large part. It upheld the trial court’s ruling on the sound basic education standards and found that the State is ultimately responsible “to meet the needs of ‘at-risk’ students” and that the State must provide services to such children “prior to their enrolling in the public schools.” Nevertheless, the court held that the trial court’s order mandating pre-kindergarten classes for all ‘at-risk’ prospective enrollees was not supported by a sufficient record. The type of services that four-year-old “at risk” children should receive, the court found, rested with the expertise of the legislative and executive branches.
No trial was ever conducted for an urban, wealthy district. There are a few possible explanations for this: even without the urban-district trial, the trial court made statewide findings of inadequacy, Robert F. Orr, The Long and Winding Road: The Leandro Saga Continues, 101 N.C. L. Rev. F. 222, 238(2023). ; and by the time of Leandro IV, all but one of the plaintiff-intervenor districts had withdrawn, id. at 243–44.
Recent Events
In the aftermath of the economic downturn, the 2009-2010 budget included significant cuts to programs important to compliance with the court’s requirements that the state provide every child with a competent teacher, a competent principal and adequate resources. In particular, it reduced funding for ‘at-risk’ student services by twelve percent in the next two fiscal years and curtailed pre-kindergarten services for ‘at-risk’ children. On May 10, 2011, plaintiffs in Hoke filed a request for a hearing on the state’s reduction of pre-kindergarten services for ‘at-risk’ children.
On July 18, 2011, Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning held that the state of North Carolina cannot enforce the portion of the 2011 Budget Bill that limits admission of ‘at-risk’ four-year-olds to the state’s prekindergarten program. Subsequently, Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue issued Executive Order 100 directing the Department of Health and Human Services to work with North Carolina’s education agencies to comply with the court. Additionally, an appeals court held that the state must admit any eligible ‘at-risk’ child who applies to its pre-kindergarten program – not just in Hoke County but statewide. In 2013, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the issue was moot since the legislature had substantially amended the statutes the lower courts had found unconstitutional.
Since Hoke, however, the state abandoned many other remedial commitments to providing an adequate education to students. In response to subsequent complaints by the Hoke plaintiffs, the Superior Court ordered the submission of “a definite plan of action” from the State demonstrating how they intended to correct educational deficiencies. When the State submitted a plan to respond to the Court’s order, plaintiffs countered that the plan lacked clearly defined actions, timetables for implementation, measurable objectives, an assessment of required resources and a mechanism to obtain those resources.
Signaling a new era in this long-running lawsuit, attorneys in July 2017 the two sides jointly requested that the court appoint an independent consultant. In March 2018, Superior Court Judge David Lee, who had succeeded Judge Manning in presiding over the case, denied a motion of the State Board of Education to be dismissed from the case. The Court firmly rejected the Board’s claim that legislative actions since 2002 had rendered the case moot, holding that at no time have the state’s actions “demonstrated even remote compliance” with the requirements of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Leandro. At that time, he also followed a joint recommendation from both plaintiffs and state defendants in appointing WestEd as an independent consultant to write a comprehensive remedial action plan.
In December 2019, West Ed released a 300-page report describing how the North Carolina state legislature had dramatically cut back on education funding since the 1990s, a time when the state was posting large achievement gains and led the country in reducing the minority-White achievement gap. During this same period, the number of children in the state with extraordinary needs rose by 88 percent, and the report concluded that North Carolina had made little progress in providing each child with the opportunity to receive a “sound basic education” as delineated in Hoke and Leandro. Notably, the WestEd Report concluded that “the state is further away from meeting its constitutional obligation to provide every child with the opportunity for a sound basic education than it was when the Supreme Court of North Carolina issued the Leandro decision more than 20 years ago.”
In January 2020, Judge Lee adopted the major recommendations from the West Ed report and issued a Consent Order. The order required the state to revise its teacher and principal training, pay, and professional development systems, develop an adequate finance system that meets the needs of all North Carolina students, and implement assessment and accountability systems consistent with the Leandro standard. The order also required the State Defendants to submit a progress report within 60 days detailing how they will begin to immediately implement the recommendations outlined in the consent order. They must also provide a timetable for submission of mid-range actions and comprehensive, remedial, long range actions necessary for full compliance and a cost estimate of the additional resources needed for compliance.
The Covid crisis interrupted the parties’ negotiations to develop the action plan required by the consent order, and at the parties’ request, in September, 2020, the Court approved a further consent order that outlined one-year immediate action steps the State would take in Fiscal Year 2021 (2020-21) to begin to adequately address the constitutional violations.
In March, 2021, Governor Roy Cooper and the North Carolina State Board of Education, submitted a detailed eight-part Comprehensive Remedial Plan in response to the consent order. This plan outlined the full scope of the actions that the State intended to take between 2021 and 2028 to ensure compliance. These actions included:
- A system of teacher development and recruitment that ensures each classroom is staffed with a high-quality teacher who is supported with early and ongoing professional learning and provided competitive pay;
- A system of principal development and recruitment that ensures each school is led by a high quality principal who is supported with early and ongoing professional learning and provided competitive pay;
- A finance system that provides adequate, equitable, and predictable funding to school districts and, importantly, adequate resources to address the needs of all North Carolina schools and students, especially at-risk students as defined by the Leandro decisions;
- An assessment and accountability system that reliably assesses multiple measures of student performance against the Leandro standard and provides accountability consistent with the Leandro standard;
- An assistance and turnaround function that provides necessary support to low-performing schools and districts;
- A system of early education that provides access to high-quality prekindergarten and other early childhood learning opportunities to ensure that all students at-risk of educational failure, regardless of where they live in the State, enter kindergarten on track for school success; and
- An alignment of high school to postsecondary and career expectations, as well as the provision of early postsecondary and workforce learning opportunities, to ensure student readiness to all students in the State.
The Plan detailed the actions the State and State Board of Education committed to taking and the corresponding goals that they intended to achieve by 2028, with the full educational benefits of these measures to be realized by 2030. Included in the plan was an Appendix that detailed the implementation timeline for each action step, as well as the estimated additional State investment necessary for each of the actions described in the Plan.
The plan estimated that $5.6 billion would be necessary to fund these actions. This included $1.2 billion dollars of funding to help economically disadvantaged students as well as increasing funding for specialized support personnel – such as school psychologists, nurses, counselors, and social workers—by $743 million. The actual cost of the eight-year plan would likely have been much higher because some recommended items —like raising pay for teachers, principals and assistant principals—didn’t have a total cost estimate.
In a June 2021, Judge Lee approved the comprehensive eight-part plan submitted jointly by the plaintiffs and Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, including its estimated $5.6 billion price tag. He stated in that order that “[T]he Comprehensive Remedial Plan shall be implemented in full and in accordance with the timelines set forth therein.”
After the Republican-controlled legislature failed to appropriate the funds required to implement the plan, however, in November 2021 Judge Lee ordered the State Budget Director, and other state officials to transfer approximately $1.7 billion from the State’s general fund to the State Department of Public Instruction and other agencies to allow them to implement years 2 and 3 of the Comprehensive Remedial Plan.
In his order, the judge summarized the 17- year history of the State’s failure to provide students the opportunity for a sound basic education and specifically cited the legislature’s failure to comply with his order, despite the fact that the State currently has reserves of approximately $8 billion and forecasted excess revenues this year $5 billion.
The judge was quite blunt in saying that “To allow the State to indefinitely delay funding for a Leandro remedy when adequate revenues exist would effectively deny the existence of a constitutional right to a sound basic education and effectively render the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s Leandro decision meaningless.”
At the end of November, the North Carolina Court of Appeals overruled Judge Lee’s order. By a 2-1 vote, the three- judge panel held that although the lower court was correct in saying that the state must fund the plan, it is not within its power to order money be appropriated.
In a stunning 227-page decision, the North Carolina Supreme Court in November 2022, reversed the Court of Appeals’ decision and ordered the state controller and other state officials to transfer approximately $800 million from state budget reserves to the state educational budgets to fund years 2 and 3 of the comprehensive compliance. Hoke County v. State, 879 S.E.2d 193 (NC, 2022.)
In its 4-3 decision, the state supreme court refused to permit further delay in fully vindicating the state students’ constitutional right. It remanded the case to the trial court to recalculate the exact amount of funds required for the transfer and ordered that the trial court retain jurisdiction to ensure that the plan is fully implemented in the years to come.
The court stated the significance of the case in potent language:
In 2004, we affirmed the trial court’s determination “that the State had failed in its constitutional duty to provide certain students with the opportunity to attain a sound basic education,” and that “the State must act to correct those deficiencies.”… At that still-early stage of the litigation, this Court deferred to the legislative and executive branches to craft and implement a remedy to this failure.
In the eighteen years since, despite some steps forward and back, the foundational basis for the ruling of Leandro … has remained unchanged: today, as in 2004, far too many North Carolina schoolchildren … are not afforded their constitutional right to the opportunity to a sound basic education. …
Now, this Court must determine whether [the state’s constitutional] duty is a binding obligation or an unenforceable suggestion. We hold the former: the State may not indefinitely violate the constitutional rights of North Carolina schoolchildren without consequence. Our Constitution is the supreme law of the land; it is not optional. In exercising its powers under the Appropriations Clause, the General Assembly must also comply with its duties under the Education Provisions.
Rejecting the legislature’s separation of powers objections, the Court further held that:
[W]hen inaction by those exercising legislative authority threatens fiscally to undermine the integrity of the judiciary, a court may invoke its inherent power to do what is reasonably necessary for the orderly and efficient administration of justice.”… Although “Article V prohibits the judiciary from taking public monies without statutory authorization [,]” when the exercise of remedial power “necessarily includes safeguarding the constitutional rights of the parties [,] … the court has the inherent authority to direct local authorities to perform that duty. …
On March 17, 2023, the North Carolina Supreme Court, by a 5-2 majority vote, issued a complex procedural ruling that has the effect of blocking the trial judge from conducting further proceedings to enforce the Court’s November 22, 2022 decision: Hoke Co. Bd of Educ v. State. Two Republican-endorsed Justices had taken office the previous January, taking the place of two of the Justices who had been in the majority that issued the decision upholding the lower court’s order to the Comptroller to transfer funds necessary to enforce the Court’s compliance order.
On October 2023, the North Carolina Supreme Court granted a petition for a discretionary review of whether the court had subject matter jurisdiction of the Leandro case, with five Republicans voting in favor and two Democrats voting against it.
After over two years of deliberation, in April 2026, the court held in a 4-3 decision, that the trial court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to rule on the case, and vacated the 2022 remedial order. Hoke County v. State, 927 S.E.2d 600 NC, 2026. The 244-page decision had one concurring and three dissenting opinions, with Republican Justice Richard Dietz dissenting alongside the court’s Democratic minority. The ruling did not, however, refute the Court’s 1997 holding that North Carolina students have a right to the opportunity for a “sound, basic education” under the state constitution.
Stating that “a court’s lack of subject matter jurisdiction is not waivable and can be raised at any time,” the majority’s opinion determined that the complaints filed by students in the 11 school districts that initiated the Leandro case alleged “specific concerns about the implementation and delivery of educational opportunities in 1994 and 2005.” The only trial that took place in this case was the trial in Hoke county that the trial court, with the parties’ consent, had designated as the “focus” district for considering the funding issues in the poor rural districts….. Based on that fact, the Court held that “The only established as-applied violation of defendants’ constitutional duty to provide schoolchildren with an opportunity for a sound basic education was a resource allocation issue impacting at-risk students in Hoke County” as of 2025 and that the state financing system that was declared unconstitutional at that time had been substantially revised as of 2017.
Justice Earls, in an extensive dissenting opinion joined by Justice Riggs, argued that “It is simply not true, as the majority asserts, that plaintiffs’ pleadings alleged minor quibbles with narrow educational delivery systems and implementation in five counties. The statewide concerns that were eventually adjudicated in this case were first identified in the complaints giving rise to this action, including specifically concerns with statewide funding, and were enough to put the State on notice of plaintiffs’ claims.” She also asserted that:
The idea that Leandro II intended to cabin the scope of proceedings to uniquely local conditions in select counties and effectively let the State off the hook is likewise unsupported. Rather, Leandro I and II confirm that this Court for decades understood this case as a broad challenge to the adequacy of the State’s performance in providing a general and uniform system of free public schools wherein all schoolchildren can access a sound basic education. Leandro II confirmed that the State was failing this obligation, particularly for at-risk students, as evidence at trial showed.
She concluded her opinion with the scathing comment that:
One result of today’s decision of which we can be certain is the sad stain this Court leaves on its own reputation and the self-inflicted injury it deals to the Court’s standing as a coequal branch of North Carolina’s government. It is difficult to estimate the damage this Court has done to its own legitimacy by trying to rewrite a fundamental constitutional guarantee because it no longer comports with the Justices’ individual political preferences—and denying any relief to injured parties who proved in a court of law that the State violated their fundamental education rights. Such politicization threatens not just public confidence in the judicial system… but also our system of government writ large. As one scholar put it, “if law is weaponized in a way that assimilates it to partisan politics, then … we don’t have rule of law”; without rule of law, we cannot have a democracy.
Silver et al vs. The Halifax County Board of Commissioners
Unlike most counties in the state that encompass only a single school district, Halifax County, which contains about 6,000 students, is split up into three districts: Halifax County Public Schools, Weldon City Schools, and Roanoke Rapids Graded School District. Students in the county and Weldon districts are overwhelmingly African-American and from poverty backgrounds, while the Roanoke district is predominantly white. Attorneys for the parent plaintiffs have alleged that the method the county uses to distribute sales tax revenues has resulted in the Roanoke Rapids schools receiving about $4.5 million and Weldon schools $2.5 million in added local revenue between 2006 and 2014, while the county district received no country revenues at all. In addition, property owners in the Weldon and Roanoke Rapids school districts pay a supplemental property tax that generates more than $1 million a year for each district, but the county district is not allowed to do the same.
The state Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in September 2017 that the Leandro case established that state officials have the constitutional obligation to provide the opportunity for a sound basic education and that, therefore, the Halifax County parents should take their complaints to the governor and legislators rather than county officials. The dissenting judge said counties can be sued since the legislature assigned them responsibility for funding buildings and supplies.
On December 21, 2018, the North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the Court of Appeals.