The Story Of A Critical New Hampshire Education Lawsuit
From Forbes.com
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.