Opinion: It’s long past time to provide NC students the public schools they deserve

For the sixth year in a row, Rep. Julie von Haefen has introduced a bill to fully fund public schools as required by the state constitution. Republican leaders blocked those efforts. “The General Assembly’s unwillingness to even hold public hearings,” von Haefen writes, “should be a major scandal.”

I recently introduced a bill that  would fully implement the Leandro Plan – the court-mandated plan to finally fulfill North Carolina’s constitutional duty to ensure that all students have access to good public schools. 

This is the sixth year in a row I have filed a bill to implement the plan. The General Assembly’s unwillingness to even hold public hearings on any of the six bills, let alone fully fund them, should be a major scandal.

Our State Constitution guarantees all children the right to a “sound, basic” public education, no matter where they live. The Leandro case began 31 years ago, when five school districts sued the state for failing to live up to our state constitution’s promise. 

Throughout the case – under both Democratic and Republican governors and legislatures – the courts have found that students are having their rights violated. In his wisdom, Gov. Roy Cooper decided to stop fighting the case and figure out what’s necessary to give students the schools they deserve. The resulting Leandro Plan set the state on an eight-year path to finally delivering on the promise of our state constitution by the end of the 2028 school year.

At every step, however, Republicans in the General Assembly have stymied efforts to fund the plan. Now, the issue is more urgent than ever.

In North Carolina, 1.5 million public school students continue to have their basic constitutional rights violated. That’s not just my opinion. That’s the conclusion of every court that has ruled on this case since 1994. Our nation’s leading nonpartisan education experts reached the same conclusion.

Since then, we’ve moved further away from the promise of a sound basic education for all students. Test scores have fallen. Raises for teachers have failed to keep pace with the cost of living, leaving us with record-high teacher vacancies. Unaccountable and discriminatory school voucher schemes have increased budget pressures in our schools and worsened segregation. Republicans have increased their rhetorical attacks on public schools, engaging in transphobic and racist moral panics aimed to divide communities and undermine support for public schools.

Every day, I talk to families who aren’t getting the services that their children need to thrive, and to teachers who don’t have the resources and professional freedoms that they need to succeed.

My latest bill, House Bill 420, would finally ensure that the legislature does the right thing for North Carolina children.

The General Assembly’s failure to fund the Leandro Plan is a violation of law, and a result of a partisan court. When the courts ordered the legislature to fund the Leandro Plan in 2021 and 2022, the response from President Pro Tem of the Senate Phil Berger and then-Speaker of the House Tim Moore was simply: you can’t make us. They don’t dispute that students’ rights are being violated. They haven’t put forth an alternative plan to remedy this ongoing constitutional violation. They simply argue that they can ignore the parts of the constitution they disagree with. We’re seeing today how such radical, anti-democratic lawlessness is playing out in Washington DC.

Republican efforts to violate students’ constitutional rights is also abetted by a hyper-partisan North Carolina Supreme Court. In 2023, the NC Supreme Court halted the transfer of funding owed to students under this case, undermining a ruling made just months earlier. The decision ignored long-standing values of our justice system such as respect for precedent and the rule of law. The facts of the case haven’t changed, but due to the 2022 elections, the partisan makeup of the court had. While the decision flew in the face of judicial precedent, it was unsurprising that the Supreme Court let the legislature off the hook. One of the justices deciding whether Senator Phil Berger should be allowed to violate students’ constitutional rights: his son, Supreme Court justice Phil Berger, Jr. 

Rather than provide students with decent schools, Republicans have passed a series of tax cuts that have overwhelmingly benefitted corporations and the wealthy. It’s our students – particularly students from economically-disadvantaged districts – who pay for these tax cuts to the Republican donor class. The amount we now spend on public schools, relative to the size of our economy, is the second-worst in the nation. Providing the average school funding effort would mean a whopping 43 percent increase in school funding. 

But, we can readily afford to provide students with constitutional schools. We can expand NC Pre-K to make sure students start school ready to learn. We can restore funding for teacher assistants and fund teacher training to boost students’ love for reading and learning. We can fund nurses, counselors, and social workers at recommended levels to give students the supports they need and to allow our teachers to focus on teaching. We can provide elective courses and after-school programs that make school relevant and joyful.

Today, it’s more important than ever to start putting students’ needs first. The President and his allies have decimated the US Department of Education. They’ve eliminated funding supporting teacher recruitment and retention and gutted the Office of Civil Rights. Over $1 billion in federal support for students with disabilities and students from families with low incomes is at risk.

The writers of our state constitution understood that there’s nothing partisan about education. They knew that safe, welcoming, challenging, and joyous public schools are the foundation of a multi-racial democracy and vital to a thriving economy. 

As the Leandro court case has shown, we’ve never fully lived up to that promise. But we don’t have to keep violating students’ basic constitutional rights. We can reject lawlessness and finally provide students with the quality schools they deserve.