Law allows schools to sue over funding
By Steve Herring
Published in News on January 30, 2015 1:46 PM
Any effort to repeal the state law allowing boards of education to sue a county over school funding is not expected to generate much momentum in the General Assembly this session, state Rep. Jimmy Dixon said.
"Repealing that is going to be a challenge," Dixon told Wayne County commissioners earlier this week during a meeting between the board and local legislators.
The repeal is one of the top five legislative goals for the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, and was pointed out to the legislators during the meeting.
Dixon was speaking from experience -- he has already tried to repeal the law, but had to instead modify his bill to require a fuller disclosure of school funding during the trial of such a lawsuit.
If the law is repealed, the question becomes what recourse would the school board have, and how would the state constitution be followed to provide an "adequate public education?" he said.
"If indeed a board of county commissioners was to underfund, what recourse, how do you resolve that other than the people voting those people out (of office) and putting other people in," Dixon said. "I understand that."
Dixon said when he filed the bill that legislators told him that he would have to come up with a different approach if he wanted their support.
"We went to making sure that a jury that would be making that decision would have all of the facts and figures, and we were successful," he said.
"So you feel like you have changed it as much as you politically can?" County Manager George Wood said.
At that point, yes, Dixon said.
"I think that it is absolutely fair," Dixon said. "If a board of education wants to sue the county commissioners, if it gets to that point, I think the county commissioners should be able to examine the board of education on every dollar that they're spending.
"Under the new law you can (do that)."
Wood asked if that also included revenue sources, mostly which is the state.
It does, Dixon said.
Dixon said he had been frustrated while sitting in the courtroom several years watching the trial after the Duplin County Board of Education sued the county over funding.
"The judge was tied to the law," he said. "The only thing you could talk about was local funding. You couldn't show where the people of Duplin County were getting $67 more per student at that time than Wayne County was.
"You couldn't show things, but now you can. So I would say that you guys, in anticipation of conflicts with the board of education, are in much better position than you were before."
Wood said commissioners "right now" enjoy a "very good" relationship with the board of education.
"This is a statewide initiative by the NCACC because the Union County case is driving that," Wood said. "As you all know (a school board) is the only entity that can sue a county over the level of funding.
"Everybody is very concerned over that because, I think you all are aware of the Union County case where Union County and the school board were off by $9 million. The jury and judge awarded them (school board) $90 million."
The unfortunate thing about the Union County case is that it was grandfathered in, Dixon said.
The trial did not have to conducted under the new legislation that had passed, he said.
Dixon said he thinks the case actually started before he introduced a bill to change trial standards.
"Now you have a totally different environment with this statute," he said. "When a county board of education does sue a county board of commissioners, the court or the jury now has the right to see all of the figures -- federal, state and local.
"Union County was like Duplin County. When Duplin County won the $4.8 million lawsuit against the county commissioners in that court the jury could not even be told what we did (funding) locally."
At that point, Duplin was spending more money per student than was being spent in Wayne, Sampson, Pender, Jones, Lenoir and Greene counties, he said.
The legislation changed everything, he said.