On September 4, the Speaker of the NH House and 30 other lawmakers filed an amicus brief in the ConVal lawsuit arguing that the Court should overturn Claremont. A ruling to that effect would effectively put at risk the more than $800 million in education funding that the State provides in Adequacy Aid.
The current amount of Adequate Education Aid paid by the State, according to the NH Department of Education, is estimated to be $817,840,541.06 for the coming school year.
The main argument of the brief centered around a suggestion that the NH Supreme Court should treat the Claremont decisions the same way the US Supreme Court examined Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs v. Jackson decision. The brief argues that because this is a complicated question that the courts continue to be asked to rule on, clearly there must be an issue with the initial ruling that prevents the legislature from complying with the solution. For that reason, the brief argues, it is acceptable not only to ignore long standing precedent but to overturn it and return the issue entirely to the legislature.
In essence, these legislators are arguing that because the legislature has failed for 30 years to comply with the NH Supreme Court’s Claremont decisions, the Court should overturn Claremont. Such a reversal would relinquish the State of its responsibility to fund education, jeopardizing funding that districts around the state rely on and exposing students and taxpayers to even greater harms than they are suffering under our current system and its already limited State funding.
Here is what NH School Funding Fairness Project Executive Director Zack Sheehan had to say about the filing.
“Instead of owning up to their failure to adequately fund education in compliance with the Claremont rulings, these legislators are instead arguing that Claremont should be thrown out. They are trying to blame the Court for their own failure to comply with the Court’s rulings over the past 30 years. And this begs the question, what do they think the State’s role in funding education should be?
“The State failed to present a positive defense for the current $4,100 base adequacy amount during the ConVal trial, and now legislative leaders are arguing for the Court to repeal the Claremont decisions that required the legislature to create adequacy aid in the first place. The logical extension of this brief is that the State will stop paying adequacy aid all together if Claremont is overturned, and that would have drastically negative consequences on students and taxpayers in every community in the state.”