North Carolina’s school funding dispute resolution process had been initiated 40 times during the two decades between the law’s passage in 1997 and 2015 – and only resulted in litigation four times, based on a subsequent analysis published in March 2018 by the General Assembly’s Program Evaluation Division, which was created in 2007 to oversee government operations and was dissolved in 2021.
One such case originated in Union County, where the school board sued the county commissioners in 2013 over what the school board claimed was the county’s inadequate allocation for current expenses and capital funding (about $83 million of approximately $86 million that Union County’s school board had requested).
The Union County school board initially won a $91.2 million judgment against the county, but the commissioners appealed. In 2015, the Court of Appeals overturned the award, estimating that the amount of money due the school system at $3 million, according to the appellate case background. The Union County school board dropped its suit later that same year.
More recently, supporters of the Halifax County school system sued the Halifax County commissioners in 2015 over what they claimed was a failure to provide adequate current expense and capital funding to ensure that every student received a “sound, basic education” as outlined in the state Constitution.
That case eventually reached the state’s highest court, and in December 2018, the N.C. Supreme Court, upheld an earlier appellate court opinion that the responsibility for funding a sound, basic education lies with the state, not the county. (No other lawsuits pertaining to a dispute over county funding for public schools appear to have been filed since the N.C. Supreme Court issued its decision in Silver et al. v. Halifax County Board of Commissioners on December 21, 2018, based on an analysis by the School of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill.)
