On April 2, 2026, the Supreme Court of North Carolina dismissed Hoke County Board of Education v. State (originally Leandro v. State) with prejudice, ending thirty-two years of litigation over the State’s constitutional guarantee to provide a sound basic education to its citizens.[1] The Court did not hold that such a right no longer exists; rather, it held more narrowly that the suit, known as the “Leandro” litigation, had ballooned from an as-applied claim about the funding of five rural school districts into an unpled facial challenge to the State’s entire education system.[2] Accordingly, the Court found that the trial court where the suit began lacked subject matter jurisdiction to rule on such a challenge.[3] No party ever amended its complaint to challenge the constitutionality of the system writ large, a claim which only a three-judge panel of the Superior Court of Wake County can adjudicate.[4] The 4-3 ruling, however, did not foreclose a path toward a statewide challenge to an education system that recently ranked second-to-last in the nation in per-pupil funding.[5]
In Hoke County, Justice Richard Dietz, the lone Republican to join the Court’s two Democrats in dissent, proposed a viable path to litigate this right-to-education case.[6] He suggested a remand of the case with instructions to join the North Carolina General Assembly as a defendant, certify a statewide class of public school students, and designate trial judges in every judicial district to oversee Leandro claims locally.[7] The majority’s dismissal with prejudice put an end to Leandro itself, but it need not end Justice Dietz’s framework. That framework offers future plaintiffs a valuable blueprint for litigation that could achieve what Leandro never could: a statewide suit determining whether North Carolina gives every child the sound basic education its constitution guarantees.
The North Carolina Constitution declares that “[t]he people have a right to the privilege of education, and it is the duty of the State to guard and maintain that right.”[8] It further directs the General Assembly to provide “a general and uniform system of free public schools . . . wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.”[9] In 1994, students, parents, and school boards from five low-income and mostly rural counties sued North Carolina, alleging the State’s paltry funding of their county school systems denied their children this constitutional right.[10] Three years later, in Leandro v. State, the North Carolina Supreme Court held that the State must guarantee every child “an opportunity to receive a sound basic education.”[11] The trial court then heard evidence from Hoke County alone, and in 2004 the North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed its finding that the State was failing to provide at-risk students there a sound basic education.[12]
Former Justice Robert Orr, who wrote the Court’s 2004 Leandro opinion, described the “long and winding road” of this case as the most expansive in North Carolina jurisprudential history, one marked by “twists and turns” as the North Carolina Supreme Court’s membership and the state’s political landscape changed around it.[13] As the years passed, the trial court’s scope widened from Hoke County to the entire state.[14] By 2021, Governor Roy Cooper’s administration and the Leandro plaintiffs had submitted a comprehensive remedial plan, and in 2022 the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s authority to transfer state funds to pay for it.[15] That fall’s elections gave the Court a new conservative majority, and when the trial court calculated in 2023 that the State owed $677.8 million toward the plan, legislative leaders appealed on jurisdictional grounds.[16] In April 2026, the new majority agreed, voiding every order entered after 2017, including the 2022 ruling.[17] In concurrence, Justice Phil Berger Jr. warned that by voiding the 2022 decision without disavowing its reasoning, the majority invited “countless lawsuits over education policy and funding.”[18]
If those lawsuits are to come, it is worth considering whether Justice Dietz’s framework, written to salvage Leandro on remand, could support a new suit that withstands the majority’s jurisdictional objections. Justice Dietz acknowledged that the case had strayed from its original form but did not see the procedural issues lambasted by the majority as fatal. “In my view, the solution is procedural,” he wrote, offering three structural changes that could fulfill Leandro’s initial goal to create an “inclusive, lasting solution to the constitutional failings of public education.”[19]
Justice Dietz’s three fixes track the majority’s objections closely. He would join the General Assembly as a defendant, certify a statewide class of public school students, and designate a “Leandro judge” in “every judicial district, if not every county.”[20] In a footnote explaining why the case was dismissed with prejudice rather than remanding, the majority identified four key defects: (1) the complaints challenged a bygone education system that no longer exists, (2) no remaining party possessed the constitutional right in question, (3) the General Assembly, a necessary party, had never been joined, and (4) the litigation had lost genuine adversity.[21]
The first defect disappears with a new suit against the current system. Justice Dietz’s first two suggestions, joining the General Assembly and certifying a class, take care of the other three. His third suggestion, implementing local Leandro judges, points more toward how a remedy would be carried out than whether such a suit is viable. That distinction matters. Local judges would not decide whether the State is meeting its constitutional duty; a single statewide judgment would settle that question once and for all. Their role would be to enforce that judgment in districts whose needs differ, which leaves intact the main advantage of a class suit: one ruling on one statewide question.
Joining the General Assembly would cure two defects at once. The majority treats the legislature’s absence in Leandro as disqualifying because it is a necessary party to any challenge to the validity of any statute or provision of the North Carolina Constitution under state law.[22] Moreover, the Court faulted the case for lacking adversity, a flaw that the General Assembly’s inclusion would cure. The General Assembly, Justice Dietz noted, has “the will and the resources” to fund competing research and propose an alternative remedy, breathing adversity back into this case.[23]
Certifying a class of current students also addresses the issue of standing. The majority stressed that the constitutional guarantee belongs to students alone, so the school boards that drove Leandro for three decades held no claim of their own, and by 2026 every original student plaintiff had aged out.[24] A class defined to include current and future public school students would not age out. As students graduate, new ones enroll, so the rights-holders could remain before the court for as long as the case lasts.
Rule 23 of the North Carolina Rules of Civil Procedure is built for exactly this situation: it permits a representative suit when the named members “will fairly insure the adequate representation of all,” and allows for the creation of such a class where its members share an interest in the issue to be resolved or the relief sought.[25] A right-to-education claim fits that standard well. The central question, whether the State’s system gives every child the opportunity for a sound basic education, turns on statewide funding and policy choices that apply to every student. Differences among districts influence the scope of the remedy, not whether the class shares the question. Named class representatives drawn from districts across the state, including the low-wealth and rural districts where Leandro began, would supply the adequate representation the rule requires. Even the State admitted, during oral argument for the most recent Leandro ruling, that a certified class “would lead to true global peace” in resolving the statewide education issue.[26]
Defenders of the Hoke County majority may contend that the real problem with Leandro was never procedure. Rather, it was an issue of constitutional interpretation that the majority merely dressed up as one of procedural defects. The majority warned that the constitution does not give the judiciary power to set education policy, harkening back to a fundamental separation-of-powers divide.[27] No certification order changes either point, and even observers who see a path forward acknowledge that the most recent ruling dims the prospect of statewide funding challenges.[28]
However, Hoke County itself was fundamentally narrow in scope, despite these undercurrents. The majority decided the case on subject matter jurisdiction and left standing the core idea that the state constitution guarantees every child the opportunity for a sound basic education. The decision makes a statewide challenge harder, but it does not foreclose one altogether, and a binding statewide judgment in a class action suit would carry significant weight, dismantling the current, and ultimately unsatisfying, conclusion that Leandro simply outran its pleadings.
A class action has one more advantage over the alternatives that Hoke County leaves open. Rob Leandro, the case’s namesake, has since urged students to continue the fight “in courtrooms across the state,” and Justice Anita Earls warns that the majority may confine future claims to a world where students can only “sue local county school boards and local school districts for local failures.” [29] Local suits cannot reach the underlying problem. County boards do not set the State’s funding formula or appropriate state dollars, so a judgment against one board leaves the statewide cause untouched and invites the next suit in the next county. The result would be piecemeal litigation, with inconsistent rulings on the same statewide funding question adding confusion and crowding dockets. A properly certified class could bind even those who are not initially included in the suit to the court’s judgment, sparing the courts from the “countless lawsuits” Justice Berger predicted.[30]
Hoke County ended Leandro on procedure but left the constitutional right to a sound basic education intact. A statewide class action built on Justice Dietz’s framework is the clearest way for North Carolina’s students to enforce that right.
[1] Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ. v. State, 927 S.E.2d 600 (N.C. 2026).
[2] Id. at 606.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Danielle Farrie & Robert Kim, Making the Grade: How Fair is School Funding in Your State?, Educ. L. Ctr. (Dec. 2025), https://edlawcenter.org/research/making-the-grade-2025.
[6] Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 927 S.E.2d at 685 (Dietz, J., dissenting).
[7] Id.
[8] N.C. Const. art. I, § 15.
[9] N.C. Const. art. IX, § 2(1).
[10] Ann McColl, Everything You Need to Know About the Leandro Litigation, EdNC (Aug. 20, 2026), https://www.ednc.org/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-leandro-litigation.
[11] Leandro v. State, 488 S.E.2d 249, 255 (N.C. 1997).
[12] Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ. v. State, 599 S.E.2d 365, 391 (N.C. 2004).
[13] Robert F. Orr, The Long and Winding Road: The Leandro Case Saga Continues, 101 N.C. L. Rev. F. 222, 222 (2023).
[14] McColl, supra note 10.
[15] Id.; Summary of the Leandro Comprehensive Remedial Plan, N.C. Off. of the Governor (June 29, 2021), https://governor.nc.gov/comprehensive-remedial-plan-summary-commission-06292021/open.
[16] Marcus Gadson, North Carolina Supreme Court Throws Out Decades-Old Right-to-Education Case, State Ct. Rep. (Apr. 13, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/north-carolina-supreme-court-throws-out-decades-old-right-education-case.
[17] Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 927 S.E.2d at 607.
[18] Id. at 647 (Berger, J., concurring).
[19] Id. at 681 (Dietz, J., dissenting).
[20] Id. at 681–86.
[21] Id. at 607 n.5, 645 n.26.
[22] Id. at 645 n.26 (citing N.C. Gen. Stat. Ann. § 1A-1, R. 19(d)).
[23] Id. at 684 (Dietz, J., dissenting).
[24] Id. at 645 n.26.
[25] N.C. R. Civ. P. 23(a); see also Crow v. Citicorp Acceptance Co., 354 S.E.2d 459, 462 (N.C. 1987) (establishing in North Carolina that a class exists “when each of the members has an interest in either the same issue of law or of fact”).
[26] Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 927 S.E.2d at 685 (Dietz, J., dissenting).
[27] Id. at 646.
[28] Anne Blythe & Carli Brosseau, Leandro Is Dead. Long Live Leandro?, The Assembly (Apr. 21, 2026), https://www.theassemblync.com/news/education/k12/leandro-north-carolina-public-education.
[29] What They’re Saying: North Carolina Leaders Weigh in on Leandro Ruling, WRAL (Apr. 2, 2026), https://www.wral.com/news/nccapitol/north-carolina-leaders-reactions-leandro-ruling-april-2026; Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 927 S.E.2d at 679 (Earls, J., dissenting).
[30] Hoke Cnty. Bd. of Educ., 927 S.E.2d at 647 (Berger, J., concurring).