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Duplin schools sue for more county funding
14 August 2008 –By John Cate, editor
The battle over funding for the Duplin County Schools will be decided in a courtroom, after the mediation between the school system and the county board of commissioners officially reached an impasse last week.
During the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 5, as the school board readied itself for a meeting which was tumultuous in its own right, over the issue of school consolidation, all parties affected by the dispute and local media received notification from mediator Andy Little that he had declared negotiations at an impasse. This was effective as of Friday, Aug. 1. No reason was given for the four-day delay in making the declaration.
The board of education and the county commissioners had been at loggerheads since June, when the county passed a budget that called for approximately $6.9 million in funding for the school system in the 2008-09 academic year. This was a slight decrease from the previous year, and the school system said it could not possibly operate on that level of funding. They had asked for more than $12.2 million for this year, and said they needed about $9.5 million just to operate at all in 2008-09.
Last month, the board of education invoked a provision in state law which allowed it to challenge the funding allocation, which resulted in both sides hiring lawyers—more than $75,000 has been spent on attorneys already—and the hiring of Little to mediate.
On July 28, with the sides still far apart and with County Manager Mike Aldridge at one point declaring that the school board’s demands were a “moving target” and he wasn’t sure what they were asking for, the commissioners made what Aldridge described as a “good faith” effort to settle the dispute. The board added approximately $1,385,000 to the school’s budget, using a combination of monies from the county fund balance and from the state’s Average Daily Membership (ADM) funds for capital construction needs. This, plus other additional funding that the board had already offered during the mediation process, allocated about $8.7 million in funding to the school system.
Aldridge expressed the hope that this would end the dispute, but the school board still considered the allocation inadequate and proceeded with the legal process without ever discussing the matter in a public forum.
On Wednesday, Aug. 6, the day after the impasse was declared, the board of education filed suit in Duplin County Superior Court, demanding an unspecified amount of money. The commissioners responded Friday, filing a motion with the court for summary dismissal of the suit, on the ground that: 1) sovereign immunity states that a government agency cannot be sued without its consent; 2) no formal vote was taken by the school board on whether the additional allocation of funds was enough to operate the school system; and 3) the school board never voted to initiate the suit.
No ruling had been made on this motion at press time. If the school board were to prevail on its first point, it would effectively declare the law under which the board of education challenged the allocation in the first place to be unconstitutional.
Assuming the case goes forward as currently scheduled, it will take precedence over all other business before the court. The case will be heard as a jury trial, and when each side has presented its case, the jury will have the option of accepting the commissioners’ allocation, the demands of the school board, or some figure between the two. If the board of education wins the case, it can also require the commissioners to pay all the court costs.
In the event that the school board wins the case, Aldridge has already confirmed that the Board of Commissioners may have to pass a supplementary tax increase to fund whatever budget the school system is awarded.
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