A divided New Hampshire Supreme Court directed the state government on Tuesday to nearly double the base education adequacy payment it expends per student, but the court stopped short of calling for the change to take effect immediately, as a lower court had ordered.
Many public school advocates celebrated the highly-anticipated decision as a major victory in a three-decade-long legal fight. Though the state’s highest court has previously ruled that the state had a duty to adequately fund education, justices for the first time put a specific dollar amount on what that responsibility costs.
The court affirmed a lower court finding that an adequate education costs at least $7,356, rather than the $4,182 currently allocated per pupil, finding that an education includes guidance counselors, instructional materials and technology, among other things. The court described the $7,356 figure as “a conservative minimum threshold” that should serve as “guidance for future legislative action.”
If the legislative and executive branches heed the court’s ruling and school budgets stay roughly the same following the change, the increase will reduce local education property taxes across the state.
“This is a very strong decision; very strong in support of public schools,” Rep. Dave Luneau, a Hopkinton Democrat and the minority leader on the House Education Funding Committee, said in an interview.
The court reached separate 3-2 majorities on the two different aspects of the decision, which was written by retiring Justice James P. Bassett. The case, ConVal v. State of New Hampshire, was brought by 18 school districts in the state.
In the first part, which affirmed Rockingham County Superior Court Judge David Ruoff’s 2023 decision to set a minimum adequacy payment, Bassett was joined by two substitute judges who have retired from the superior court. They replaced Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi, who is on administrative leave, and Chief Justice Gordon J. MacDonald, who recused himself due to his past legal work on school funding cases as the state’s attorney general.
In the second part, which reversed the lower court’s decision that the change must take effect immediately, Bassett was joined by Justices Patrick Donovan and Melissa Countway. The substitute judges dissented.
“We urge the legislative and executive branches to act expeditiously to ensure that all the children in public schools in New Hampshire receive a State funded, constitutionally adequate education,” Bassett wrote.
The court released the decision on the first day of the state’s new two-year budget and did not set a timeline for when the legislature must act. The next legislative session will not begin in earnest until January 2026, and the legislature will not approve the next budget until the summer of 2027.
Zack Sheehan, the executive director of the School Funding Fairness Project, immediately called on the legislature to hold a special session to respond to the ruling.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte expressed little inclination to do so, immediately criticizing the ruling.
“The Court reached the wrong decision today,” Ayotte wrote in a statement, referring to data that shows New Hampshire funds education at one of the higher rates in the country. The figure she cited is for total per-pupil spending, which includes spending via local property taxes. The percentage of education funding that comes from the state is among the lowest, which places a particularly high burden on lower-income communities.
Rep. Rick Ladd and Sen. Ruth Ward, the Republican leaders of the House Education Funding Committee and Senate Education Committee, respectively, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
The decision will require the state to raise or reappropriate over $500 million per year to fund the additional adequacy payments, according to the ruling. Though it’s not clear how they will do so, one option could involve increasing and restructuring the statewide education property tax. Sheehan said the state could also reintroduce an interest and dividends tax or increase the business profits tax on major corporations.
In response to previous Supreme Court rulings calling for the state to adequately fund public education, the legislature and governor have dawdled and public education advocates have accused the branches of inaction. Sheehan said that the specific dollar amount laid out in Tuesday’s decision will make the directive harder to ignore.
“This ruling reinforces the many decades of precedent that have already come from this court supporting State funding for public education,” he wrote in a statement. “The legislature has had a responsibility to fix our school funding system ever since the Claremont decisions. This ruling makes it even clearer what that means and leaves no more room for excuses from the legislature.”
In their joint dissent, Justices Donovan and Countway argued that the court lacked the power to set a specific minimum threshold for the delivery of an adequate education. They separately contended that the state was meeting its burden already on the basis of the additional money that local districts raise for education.
Lawmakers could conceivably respond to the ruling by reconstituting the adequacy formula entirely. The formula currently provides additional money to school districts for each student who qualifies for free and reduced lunch, has a special education need or is an English-language learner. If the definition of base adequacy were altered to include those additional payments, the total increase would only be a few hundred dollars per student, according to Drew Cline, the executive director of the free-market think tank the Josiah Bartlett Center.
The Supreme Court’s decision comes as the plaintiffs in a related school funding case, Rand v. State of New Hampshire, await a separate ruling on whether those additional adequacy payments are currently constitutionally sufficient as is.
Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.
