Education Law

A big win for N.C. kids, but will politicians take it away?

The North Carolina School Boards Association (NCSBA) has won a big judgment for North Carolina's children in the lawsuit it brought against the state over funds the state wrongfully withheld from schools from 1995 to 2006. All the details on this long-running saga are here, courtesy of last week's NSBA Legal Clips service, but here's the gist: The state failed to direct money from civil fines and forfeitures to technology in schools, which the state constitution requires. Now a North Carolina court has determined the state owes schools nearly $750 million.

The court said it wished the judgment had been unnecessary, and it placed the blame pretty squarely on one side:

The Court has encouraged negotiations between the plaintiffs and the Legislative and Executive branches because in the end the issue is whether the legislature will appropriate funds to make up for the resources which were required to go to public schools under Article IX, Section 7 of the Constitution but which were diverted to other purposes by the defendants. The Plaintiffs have often expressed their willingness to settle on a lesser amount than the total which was improperly withheld from the schools from 1995 to 2006. The Plaintiffs have been exceptionally patient in pressing their claim for relief for moneys that clearly were owed to them over a long period of time. Indeed, the issue of whether the constitution requires civil penalties to go to public schools was decided in the Craven County case in 1996, and most of the present lawsuit should not have been necessary.

Not much ambiguity there. But school boards, parents, and kids may need still more patience. Some state lawmakers still don't seem to have learned the lesson, according to the Raleigh News & Observer. Having been zinged for improperly diverting money from children in the first place, they now are talking about satisfying the court's judgment simply by taking money away from other education programs.

In a statement, NCSBA's executive director Ed Dunlap warns, "NCSBA does not believe that such a response would comply with the court order which is intended to restore technology funding that was wrongly diverted to other purposes. Moreover, taking that amount of money from school operating funds would cripple the public schools." NCSBA has made clear that it's willing to work with state officials so that schools can be paid back in a manageable way over time.

"All kids can learn," goes the battle cry in education. Hopefully the same thing applies to legislators.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on August 20, 2008 (boomark / email).