The state is asking the New Hampshire Supreme Court to overturn the decades-old rulings that established its constitutional duty to fund public education.
In a 125-page brief filed late last week, Deputy Solicitor General Samuel Garland argued that the legal basis of the state’s funding of public schools is “fundamentally incompatible with the text and history of the New Hampshire Constitution” because it overrides the authority of local governments and “distorts the relationship between the state and its political subdivisions.”
As a result, the brief argues, the rules and rulings often known by the shorthand of Claremont should be “abandoned” or at least modified to hand more authority, as well as resulting costs, back to cities and towns. Further, it argues the Supreme Court should rule “that the question of how the legislature chooses to cost and fund an adequate education is a non-justiciable political question,” meaning that it would be up to the state legislature rather than rulings by courts.
Republican lawmakers have repeatedly criticized the Claremont rulings in the decades since they were first reached, but this appears to be the first time the state has asked that the underlying precedents to be reversed, according to school funding experts.
The brief comes as part of the state’s appeal of a superior court judge’s ruling last year in Rand et al. v. State of New Hampshire. The plaintiffs are slated to file their response in October, with oral arguments before the state Supreme Court coming later.
In Rand, the lower court ruled that current special education and adequacy payments don’t meet its constitutional duty established in the Claremont cases. It was the latest in multiple court rulings triggered by suits filed in the 1990s by school districts in Claremont and four other communities who said years of weak funding left them unable to provide the education that the state Constitution required.
“At the end of the day, the state is asking the Court to make the school funding problem harder to challenge instead of actually solving it,” said Zack Sheehan, executive director of the New Hampshire School Funding Fairness Project, in a prepared statement. “Families will still receive the property tax bills. School boards will still face impossible budget choices. Students will still have different opportunities depending on the property wealth of the community where they live.”
