In several states, school funding formulas have been challenged in court, resulting in orders for the state to mend its school funding ways. Pennsylvania was one of the most recent such cases in which the court found that the state’s funding system violated the state constitution by funding local schools at wildly unequal levels.
One of the earliest examples of such a case was the Claremont suit in New Hampshire which resulted in a pair of decisions that called for radical re-imagining of the state’s school funding system. Now a new book from the lead counsel for the landmark case tells the story of how it found its way through the system over thirty years ago.
In The Last Bake Sale, attorney Andru Volinsky argues “School funding is the story of how we treat our children. It is also about how we treat our democracy.”
Volinsky sets the stage by tracing the origin of the fair school funding movement to the years after Brown v. Board of Education rendered racial school segregation illegal. The segregation of students is often used to segregate resources; a challenge to inequity leads to a discussion of fair funding, and Volinsky discusses several of the cases that raised that challenge before arriving at the Claremont lawsuit.
The bulk of the book covers the lawsuit from the insider’s point of view. Where one might expect a somewhat sleepy tale of legal maneuverings, Volinsky manages to weave the political angles, the personalities, the ideological stances, and the strategies into a brisk narrative that carries us through the tale.
There are striking moments in the tale. The suit involved Claremont schools and four other districts, and the arguments included comparisons between those districts and similar-yet-wealthier districts. In Rye School District, the equalized per-pupil property value was over a million dollars; in Allenstown, the value was $128,279. Rye had a full technology lab with networked computers; Allenstown had a single computer on a cart.
The defense in such cases included some unusual claims. When the plaintiffs highlighted Claremont’s twelve-to-sixteen year old textbooks, the state responded that the pages were all there. The state board of education chair later in the trial testified that books were unnecessary for a successful school.
Claremont’s problem was one that many districts can still recognize today; with the highest property tax rate in the state, they still could not provide the necessary basic funding for their schools.
The state Supreme Court reached a decision in 1993 (Claremont I), and then a follow-up ruling on Claremont School District v. Governor of News Hampshire (Claremont II) came in December of 1997. That decision said, in part:
While the State may delegate its obligation to provide a constitutionally adequate public education to local school districts, it may not do so in a form underscored by unreasonable and inequitable tax burdens.
As with many such court decisions, the Claremont decisions were followed by foot-dragging by legislators and governors. In 2023, a new trial court ruling from Contoocook Valley School District v. The State of New Hampshire in which the court, consulting school funding experts, came up with an actual dollar amount for an “adequate education,” and in a separate case where Volinsky is co-counsel, Steven Rand v. The State of New Hampshire, the same court found the state’s handling of property taxes unconstitutional.
The legal battle for school funding that Volinsky describes is not ancient history, but continues today as a struggle in New Hampshire (and that struggle reflects the struggle in many other states as well). It turns out that a narrative about a court case from the 1990s is not just an interesting narrative from the past; as Howard Altschiller, executive editor of Seacoast Media Group put it in a headline, “Want to understand New Hampshire’s education funding fights? Read Andru Volinsky’s book.”
The New Hampshire Funding Fairness Project continues the advocacy work that the plaintiffs of Claremont started. Volinsky’s book serves as a picture of how that work started, a riveting, illuminating, and encouraging tale of the New Hampshire struggle that also provides lessons for people in other states.