From the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law:
Justice Robert F. Orr (retired) and Jason Kay, attorneys affiliated with the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, filed a declaratory judgment action today on behalf of seven North Carolina public charter schools and several parents and students affiliated with those schools challenging the constitutionality of the State?s funding system for public charter schools. The suit seeks to address inequities and discriminatory provisions of North Carolina law which disfavor public charter school students as compared to their friends and colleagues in the traditional public school system.
Presently, North Carolina law does not permit counties and local school administrative units to provide funds from the capital outlay fund to public charter schools. The law does authorize these funds for traditional public schools. Yet, the North Carolina Constitution requires that the General Assembly may only establish a uniform system of public schools.
?Creating the public charter school system, without providing a uniform opportunity to those students to receive capital outlay funds from counties and local school administrative units is ? even in its simplest terms ? fundamentally not uniform treatment. Public charter students should have a uniform opportunity to get the funding that traditional public schools get, plain and simple,? Orr said.
While the North Carolina Supreme Court held in Leandro that counties were free to supplement State funds in ways that resulted in inequitable funding for public education from county to county, this suit asks the Court to answer a fundamentally different legal question. Here, the disparate funding scheme applies inequitably to public school students residing in the same county or local school administrative unit. The question is whether or not the inequitable funding requirement for public charter schools is ?uniform? within the meaning of the Constitution of North Carolina.
?This suit merely asks for a seat at the county capital funding table. These public charter school students want equal access so they can request from their counties and school boards the same categories and levels of funding that their neighbors and friends get in the traditional public schools. What local public officials may decide to do with those requests is not the subject of this suit. But if the Constitution requires uniformity in the system of public education, the plaintiffs are asking if all public school students within the same county should have uniform access to funding, whether charter or traditional,? said Jason Kay, Senior Staff Attorney at NCICL.
The suit was filed in Mecklenburg County by Sugar Creek Charter School and several other public charter schools and their students from across the State. Sugar Creek Charter School has recently prevailed in two cases before the North Carolina Court of Appeals in seeking to remedy the inequitable funding charter schools received from the local current expense fund.
Included as defendants in the lawsuit due to their status as parties that have an interest in the outcome of the declaratory judgment action are 15 governmental parties, including the State of North Carolina and the counties of Mecklenburg, Union, Rutherford, Cleveland, Nash, Edgecombe, and Halifax. Related school boards in each county were also included.