Advocacy groups to Gov. Cooper: Include Leandro funding in state budget
Dozens of children- and education-focused organizations have signed onto a letter asking Gov. Roy Cooper to include compliance with the Leandro court case in his proposed 2021-23 budget.
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The groups anticipate a long-term action plan in the 25-year-old case to be filed in North Carolina Superior Court on Monday.
Implementation of the action plan — a $426.9 million plan that seeks to remedy inequitable access to adequate education for the state’s children — is due to be complete June 30.
“The final step is securing the budgetary and statutory changes necessary to implement these crucial reforms,” the groups wrote in a letter to Cooper. “Your budget request is vital to securing these long-awaited changes.”
Every Child NC sent the letter on behalf of the Public School Forum of North Carolina, the American Civil Liberties Union North Carolina chapter, the North Carolina Association of Educators and numerous other groups.
According to a Sept. 1 state superior court order, the state must:
- Get qualified and well-prepared teachers in every classroom by expanding the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program, increasing diversity among teachers, providing mentoring and assistance to teachers in low-performing, high-poverty schools and improving compensation, among other things
- Get qualified and well-prepared principals in every classroom through preparation programs, among other things
- Establish a funding system that provides “adequate, equitable, and efficient” resources to every school, including by revising the state’s funding formula, lifting restrictions on the ABC transfer system
- Develop a plan for reliably assessing multiple measures fo student performance
- Implement new plans to support low-performing and high-poverty schools and to provide comprehensive support and “progressive turnaround assistance” to chronically low-performing schools and districts
- Provide access to high-quality pre-kindergarten and other early childhood learning
- Align high school expectations to preparation for college-level coursework and career expectations
The state has developed plans to implement much of the order. Case consultant WestEd has published a comprehensive plan for complying with the court case.
The Leandro case, filed in 1996 and ruled on a year later, concerns fundamental inequities in how North Carolina funds its schools and whether higher poverty counties had access to adequate and equitable education. The 1997 order ruled adequate education was not available to all of North Carolina’s children and orders in recent years have set timelines for funding and implementing changes to comply with that ruling.
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