For as long as Jackie McLean can remember, Hoke County Schools has struggled to find resources. She first saw it as a parent in the 1990s, when her daughter couldn’t take her books home to do homework.
“They had science labs, but really had no labs,” McLean recalls. “They had the room, but they didn’t have the supplies and the tools. They had math, but they didn’t have enough of math books. They didn’t have enough of social studies books, so it was really hard for me to understand how a student is supposed to be successful when they don’t have the tools that they need.”
That was why, in 1994, Hoke County Schools and four other low-wealth school districts across North Carolina filed a lawsuit alleging the state was failing to provide enough funding for an adequate education. Now called the Leandro case, that lawsuit is still going on today. At stake are potentially billions of dollars in future school funding and questions about how to fix an education system that courts have long ruled is failing students.
McLean is now a dropout prevention specialist at Hoke County Schools. She says places like Hoke County are still facing the same challenges.
“Over the last 30 years, we’re seeing, that’s three different generations, right?” McLean said. “Now we are dealing with the children of those children, and even some of the grandchildren of those children. And the need increases with time.”
The Leandro case has a twisting history of unorthodox court proceedings, complex legal questions and a healthy dose of politics. There have been four state Supreme Court rulings, with a fifth on the way. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools joined the case but was also sued by a different set of plaintiffs. It’s now listed as both a plaintiff and a defendant. Robb Leandro, the Hoke County student who became the case’s lead plaintiff, is all grown up now. He declined an interview because he’s now a lawyer at the firm that represents the school districts.
So what’s taken so long?
Leandro: A brief history
According to Gerry Hancock, a Raleigh-based attorney whose firm Everett Gaskins Hancock, has worked as an adviser and lobbyist for the low-wealth school districts since the 1990s, part of the reason was the non-traditional subject matter and procedure of the case.
“It was not like a conventional three-hour trial that we see on television, leading to a verdict," Hancock said. "This was in fact a long, long, long inquiry into maybe the most complex subject that the state has to deal with.”
In 1997, the state Supreme Court ruled that all North Carolina students were entitled to a “sound, basic education.” But determining whether students in North Carolina were being denied that and, more crucially, how to fix it turned out to be more complicated. For years, Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning and his successors conducted an exhaustive inquiry, using Hoke County as a proxy case.
“Judge Manning went out and he personally visited schools, talked to educators, did it frequently,” Hancock said. “He read widely. He held many, many hearings.”
By 2004, Manning’s trial had produced at least 400 pages of decision memorandums and more than 50 boxes of exhibits and transcripts.
“Among the things he found was that the right was being massively denied to tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of children, particularly disadvantaged children,” Hancock said.
That year, the state Supreme Court reaffirmed Manning’s findings, at least with regard to Hoke County students. But in the decade that followed, rather than order any specific fix, Manning and his successors tried to push state leaders to address the problems, with little success, argues Jane Wettach, a retired Duke law professor who has filed amicus briefs in the case.
“One of the things you were asking about, why is this case taking so long? One of the reasons is because the various judges that have been involved in the case have time and again given the state — sort of writ large, all the branches, but mostly the executive and the legislative branches in this case — every possible opportunity to fix the problem,” Wettach said.
In 2021, then-Gov. Roy Cooper’s Democratic administration agreed to a multi-year, nearly $6 billion roadmap to recruit qualified educators and provide equitable funding — the so-called Comprehensive Remedial Plan built on a lengthy report from WestEd, a court-ordered consultant.
But the Republican-led General Assembly was reluctant to enact it. When Superior Court Judge David Lee ordered the state treasurer to release $1.7 billion to cover a portion of the plan, Republican legislative leaders appealed, saying the General Assembly has ultimate power over the state budget. In November 2022, the then-Democratic majority state Supreme Court sided with Lee and ordered the release of funding. Courts typically don’t revisit their own decisions without change in the underlying facts of the case.
But what changed on Election Day just four days later, was the political makeup of the Supreme Court. Republican leaders appealed again in 2023. The newly elected, Republican-led court agreed to hear the case again. It’s been a year since the state Supreme Court heard those arguments, and there’s still no ruling.
The amount at stake has been whittled down to around $678 million — that’s how much is left underfunded for years two and three of the eight-year comprehensive remedial plan. But many education advocates argue the case is really about forcing the state to commit to fixing an underfunded education system.
“You have to worry if the way we were designing and funding our schools might be maintaining a permanent underclass that would be doomed to repeat the cycle of poverty that their parents and grandparents have been caught in,” Hancock said.
Others disagree. Mitch Kokai of the conservative John Locke Foundation says the case isn’t about education funding as much as it is about precedent — a question of whether the courts should be able to force the legislature to adopt and fund a statewide education plan. He argues issues of education funding should be handled through the typical political process, not through the courts.
“At this point, the most important part of this case is its relationship to the rule of law, because one of the most recent rulings in this case from the trial court level basically said that state education agencies are going to be funded in large part by a decision from a single judge rather than through the normal political process,” Kokai said.
Matthew Tilley, an attorney for the legislators, made a similar argument in court last year, telling the state Supreme Court justices that the case “is not a contest between those who want to fund education and those who don’t.” Instead, Tilley argued it’s about whether the courts can order the state to adopt a plan that “dictates virtually every aspect of education policy and funding, not just for the districts that were plaintiffs, but for all 115 school districts across the state.”
Tilley referred a request for comment to the press offices of state House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, neither of whom responded to a request for comment. WFAE also contacted the office of U.S. Rep. Tim Moore, who was speaker when the legislature intervened in the case, but did not hear back.
Need persists in Hoke County
In Hoke County, McLean leads me through the labyrinthine campus of Hoke County High School to her office. The school is a smattering of separated, aging buildings scattered on both sides of Bethel Road in the city of Raeford. Her side of campus was built in 1960. She brings me to one of three rundown, standalone structures — like small one-room houses. She calls it her “hut.”
The hut next door to hers is abandoned — too dilapidated to hold any programming. Facility problems are common here. Recently, the heat went out in one part of campus, and a week earlier, an art teacher couldn’t get into her classroom because of structural damage.
Construction on a new high school that will replace this older section is underway, thanks to a facilities grant from the state Department of Public Instruction and an allotment from Hoke County. But it only scratches the surface of the needs of a growing district. Only two of the district's 13 facilities were built this century. Five of the district’s eight elementary schools are at least 60 years old.
Meanwhile, the district says it still struggles to find funding for instructional materials. As the pandemic drove upticks in social-emotional needs and homelessness, the district is still short on social workers and counselors. Like many other districts in the state, it lacks qualified teachers. In a district with fewer than 10,000 students, Hoke currently has 77 certified teacher vacancies. Substitutes are being used to fill gaps.
“COVID did impact us severely, in terms of, we saw more mental health issues, and we’re still seeing that and of course, we know that across the state,” says Peggy Owens, executive director of student support services at the district. “But also our academics. The academic needs as well. We did see a decline, but what we’re beginning to see now, along with the state, an increase in our students’ academics. But that’s the reason it’s important that we have those quality teachers in the classroom.”
I asked Bill Harrison, the former superintendent of Hoke County Schools who filed the lawsuit in 1994, if he ever thought at the time they’d still be litigating it today.
“Absolutely not,” he tells me.
Harrison himself represents one of those Leandro paradoxes. He went on to serve as chair of the state Board of Education, meaning he’s technically been both plaintiff and defendant in the case. But he says he’s always had a special connection to it.
“We felt that there’d be pushback, there’d certainly be challenges, but we had no clue, no idea that we’d still be talking about 30 years later,” Harrison said.
Harrison remembers how the district had a high percentage of students in need of extra support — and how the district lacked the funding to provide that support. That was, in part, what drove the community to team up with other low-wealth districts and eventually file the lawsuit. Later, Harrison went on to become a superintendent at Orange County Schools, a much wealthier district.
“I really saw what we were able to offer children in Orange County compared to what we’re able to offer children in Hoke County,” Harrison said. “It made me really realize how stark the differences were and how unfair it was, in a system that is in a state that has a constitution that guarantees the right and privilege of an education.”
He added: “The gap between the haves, if you will, and the have-nots, has actually grown.”
McLean is outraged a decision hasn’t come earlier — especially since the courts have established that students are being denied their right to a sound, basic education, particularly in Hoke County.
“I often say, you know, if me — just being a regular citizen — if I was sued and a judgment was entered against me, then I would be held accountable for my failure to pay that judgment,” McLean said. “I wouldn’t have to keep going back and forth to court.”
In the Supreme Court’s second Leandro decision, the court itself remarked on how many resources had been spent on the case, noting, “One can only wonder how many additional teachers, books, classrooms and programs could have been provided by that money.”
That observation was made in 2004, 10 years into the litigation. It’s still relevant now — 20 years later.
