In this education funding case, the ACLU-NH and National Education Association-New Hampshire ("NEA-NH") filed an amicus brief on September 30, 2024 at the New Hampshire Supreme Court supporting the Plaintiffs' position that New Hampshire’s overall system for funding education continues to violate the rights that both students and taxpayers have under Part II, Article 83 and Part II, Article 5 of the New Hampshire Constitution.
As argued in this brief, the New Hampshire Supreme Court should follow the holdings of Claremont and its progeny on both the State’s duty to provide an adequate education to public school students and to fund this effort with taxes that are uniform in rate. The State’s argument in support of overruling Claremont and its progeny is underdeveloped and offhand, and therefore should be rejected. But if the Supreme Court does consider this argument (and it should not), it should reaffirm Claremont and its progeny, as the right to an adequate education funded through uniform taxation is firmly rooted in the text of the New Hampshire Constitution, its history, and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. And, as the brief explains, if there was any doubt as to the correctness of Claremont and its progeny, the legislature has—while failing to comply with these decisions—also simultaneously and repeatedly rejected efforts to overrule or narrow these decisions, thereby demonstrating both these decisions’ importance and the public’s reliance on them. Further, the brief states that it is critical for the Supreme Court to recognize that adequate and equitable education funding helps alleviate racial inequities in our society—a principle which is especially important here where per pupil spending is comparatively low in New Hampshire’s most racially diverse cities of Manchester and Nashua. Finally, this brief explains how the applicable constitutional standards of heightened scrutiny reject deference to the legislature and squarely place the burden on the State, not the Plaintiffs.