(The Center Square) — New Hampshire is “woefully” underfunding its public schools, the state’s highest court ruled on Tuesday, calling on the Ayotte administration and lawmakers to fix the “unconstitutional” discrepancies in school aid.
The ruling by the New Hampshire Supreme Court sided with a group of school districts that sued the state six years ago over how much it spends annually on K-12 education and partially upheld a lower court ruling which had ordered the state to take action.
Justices ordered state leaders to come up with a plan to address underlying shortfalls in school funding and spend a minimum amount of money — $7.356.01 per pupil — to educate students. The court said it is “incumbent upon the legislative and executive branches to remedy the constitutional deficiency that we have identified.”
“We believe that the proper remedy cannot be to allow the legislature to continue to idle,” Justice James Bassett wrote in the 48-page ruling. “We fear that the longer the judiciary waits to carry out its constitutional duty to provide a meaningful remedy in school funding cases, the more likely it is that the legislature will continue to ignore its obligation to fund the constitutional right to an adequate education.”
Gov. Kelly Ayotte was among state leaders who blasted the ruling, arguing that the high court has authority over the state’s education funding system.
“The Court reached the wrong decision today, Ayotte, a first-term Republican, said in a statement. “The fact is, New Hampshire is top 10 in the country when it comes to funding our children’s education. We are evaluating the ruling to determine the appropriate next steps.”
The court’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed in 2019 by the Contoocook Valley School District, which claimed the state was spending too little to provide students an adequate education as required by the state constitution. Seventeen other school districts and the New Hampshire chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union eventually signed onto the legal challenge.
Two years ago, Rockingham County Superior Court Judge David Ruoff sided with the plaintiffs, declaring the current funding unconstitutional and ordering the state to boost its per student spending from a base amount of $4,100 to at least $7,356, or about $537 million a year. The state appealed that ruling.
The average cost of educating a child in New Hampshire was $21,545 in the 2023-24 school year, according to the latest data from the state Department of Education. The state provides a base level of funding per-pupil to each school district. Cities and towns are forced to pick up the difference from rising property taxes and allocating additional funding in municipal budgets.
Andrew Cline, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, said the ruling “encroaches on legislative authority” but pointed out that justices rejected the lower court’s order that the state needed to begin immediately paying $7.356.01 per pupil in school aid. He said the school districts also didn’t get everything they were seeking from the legal challenge.
“From a purely mathematical perspective, this ruling amounts to a loss for both sides,” he said in a statement. “The state is ordered to find some additional money, but districts don’t get the massive windfall some had hoped to win.”
But National Education Association-New Hampshire President Megan Tuttle said the ruling is a “long-overdue validation of what New Hampshire’s educators, parents, and students have known for decades: our public education system has been chronically underfunded, and the legislature has repeatedly failed to uphold its constitutional duty to remedy that.”
“While the Court stopped short of ordering immediate funding increases, its unequivocal acknowledgment of legislative inaction marks a significant turning point,” she said in a statement. “We urge lawmakers to read this ruling not as a mere legal critique, but as a moral call to action.”
