RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina Supreme Court this week ended a more than 30-year-old case wrestling with the roles of the courts and the legislature in public education.

The court decided that state courts do not have the authority to make decisions involving education policy, including ordering the state to spend billions of additional dollars on public education.

Thursday’s decision reversed a 2022 ruling by the Supreme Court that allowed courts to order state officials to transfer taxpayer funds to public schools. The Supreme Court at that time had a Democratic majority.

The case, which is officially called Hoke County Board of Education vs. State of North Carolina, is known as the Leandro case because the Leandro family was the first plaintiff listed in the lawsuit when it was filed in 1994.

The court ordered the lawsuit dismissed, but its action left several questions unanswered while raising new ones:

Question: Does Thursday’s decision mean school budgets will be cut?

Answer: No, but it means public schools will not receive the additional hundreds of millions of dollars awarded in the 2022 ruling.

In 1997, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution guarantees every child in the state the right to a “sound basic education.” In 2004, the court ruled that the state was inadequate in fulfilling that right.

After a decade of hearings, education consulting company WestEd released a report in 2019 with recommendations. It would have cost $5.6 billion to implement over a span of eight years.

Union County Superior Court Judge David Lee, a Democrat, in 2021 ordered the state’s budget director, controller and treasurer to transfer $1.7 billion to public schools.

That same month, the North Carolina Court of Appeals blocked the transfer.

Q: Have school districts received any of the money?

A: No, money has never been transferred.

After the 2022 ruling, which was issued days before the North Carolina midterm elections, the N.C. Supreme Court sent the case back to a trial judge to determine how much would be transferred.

In the midterm election, Republicans won two seats to flip the Supreme Court to a 5-2 majority.

The new court then ruled in 2023 to reinstate the 2021 appellate order that blocked the transfer of funds. No funds had yet been dispersed.

Q: Does this mean the Supreme Court can reverse other previous rulings?

A: Not exactly, since the decision’s reversal declared the previous ruling to be “void ab initio,” roughly meaning “as if it didn’t happen.”

Attorney Ann McColl has served as the legislative director for the State Board of Education, as well as legal counsel and director of policy for the North Carolina School Boards Association.

McColl told The News & Observer Friday that the majority of the N.C. Supreme Court decided that, since 2017, the nature of the claims of the original lawsuit changed significantly.

Because of that, she said, the court ruled that the plaintiffs should have included subject-matter jurisdiction — the issue and the court’s authority to adjudicate the case — in their pleadings.

“So, their rationale then is, if the court didn’t have authority to make any of those decisions ... it should be as if it never happened,” McColl said. “And so that’s what they did.”

In other words, basing their decision on procedural grounds — that the courts shouldn’t have heard the case in the first place — allowed the justices to effectively shut down any discussion of the actual merits of the case.

For another ruling to be reversed in this way, McColl said, the judges would have to “go through a process of saying there’s this reason that this decision could never have been made like that.”

Q: If Democrats regain the majority, can the court reinstate the earlier ruling?

A: Even if Democrats retake the majority, McColl said, this case is over.

Later this year, one seat is up for grabs on the N.C. Supreme Court: Anita Earls, a Democrat and the incumbent. She’s being challenged by Republican Sarah Stevens. Regardless of who wins the election, Republicans will maintain their majority.

In 2028, three seats are up — all currently held by Republicans.

“There’s no resurrecting this particular lawsuit,” McColl said. “Now, it doesn’t mean that people can’t make other claims around the right to sound basic education.”

McColl said the question now is whether a new case will try to bring multiple claims up simultaneously, like Leandro, or if multiple lawsuits will take on different issues instead. She added that issues like educational rights for students with disabilities were not addressed well in Leandro.

McColl said, beyond its effect on education, “people will be looking at this case.”

“We’re taking a 30-plus-year case on a fundamental constitutional right and eviscerating it,” she said.

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