NC Supreme Court Dismisses Leandro Case After 30 Years of Litigation

After 30 years of litigation and two years since oral arguments, the NC Supreme Court dismissed the case, ruling that a previous decision had been in error.

RALEIGH, NC, UNITED STATES, April 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The long-awaited North Carolina Supreme Court ruling on the state’s landmark Leandro school funding case, is out.

In a reversal of its 2022 ruling, which required lawmakers to fund public schools according to the Leandro Comprehensive Remedial Plan (designed to bring lawmakers into constitutional compliance on school funding), the current court majority dismissed the case. The 4-3 ruling claimed that due to procedural issues in previous rulings, all findings after 2017 are nullified and “this matter is dismissed with prejudice.”

A dismissal with prejudice means the case is permanently closed and cannot be filed again. Typically, cases are only dismissed with prejudice when the persons/entities filing the case can’t prove any facts that would support a valid legal claim or when the case has serious legal problems that can’t be fixed by modifying the claim in some way.

More than thirty years of fact finding and four prior NC Supreme Court rulings had established that the North Carolina State (legislative and executive branches) had not fulfilled its obligation to North Carolina’s students. Statewide, students' right to a sound basic education under the North Carolina State Constitution had been violated, affirming the initial 1994 claim that became the landmark Leandro case. These facts were not disputed.

In her dissent, Justice Anita Earls writes that, “... the majority concludes that it will not order the State to correct the way it has harmed public school students, even in very low-wealth school districts like Hoke County, and even as two previous Courts concluded that the State is failing to adequately educate students and must act to fix the public education system. In reaching that decision, the majority relies on a hyper-technicality that is not even lawful grounds to dismiss these proceedings and was not argued by any party. Specifically, no party asked this Court to dismiss this case because it was an improper “facial” challenge. The majority’s narrow holding rests on stunning and unsupported assertions.”

The initial suit was brought by five school districts (Cumberland, Halifax, Hoke, Robeson, and Vance), families, and students. (Robb Leandro was a student in Hoke County in 1994). The suit claimed that students in the five counties were denied their right to a sound basic education under the North Carolina State Constitution.

After multiple trips to Superior Court and Supreme Court resulted in insufficient legislative progress on funding public schools, Superior Court Judge Lee appointed an outside expert (WestEd, a nonpartisan educational research organization) to determine what steps were needed to remedy the situation. (1) Their report was used by the State to develop the Leandro Comprehensive Remedial Plan, which contained specific actions and funding requirements spanning eight years starting in 2021.

In early November 2022—after the legislature failed to fund public schools according to the Comprehensive Remedial Plan—the NC Supreme Court ruled that the state was obligated to fund the first two years of the Comprehensive Remedial Plan (the two years addressed in the newest state budget).

But the 2022 elections changed the make-up of the North Carolina Supreme Court. In 2023, the new court decided to hear appeals to the Leandro ruling brought by legislative leaders who sought to halt the court-ordered payments to school districts. In her dissent to the decision to rehear the Leandro case, Justice Earls wrote, “If our Court cannot or will not enforce state constitutional rights, those rights do not exist, the constitution is not worth the paper it is written on, and our oath...is a meaningless charade.”

Oral arguments were heard in February 2024. The decision was released on April 2, 2026.

Plaintiffs were represented by Parker Poe Adams and Bernstein, Tharrington Smith, LLP. Defendants were represented by Womble Bond Dickinson (SU) LLP. The State of North Carolina was represented by representatives from the North Carolina Department of Justice.

1. WestEd: https://www.wested.org/

Heather Koons
Public Schools First NC
info@publicschoolsfirstnc.org
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