On Tuesday morning, the New Hampshire Supreme Court for the first time ordered the state to spend a minimum amount of money—$7,356.01 per pupil—to educate public school students.
The state therefore lost this landmark school funding case, Contoocook Valley School District v. State, as it had tried to avoid such a decree. But a closer read suggests that ConVal and the other school districts that sued to force an increase in state education aid also lost.
Here’s how.
(Let’s set aside for this discussion the question of whether the New Hampshire Constitution actually obligates the state to determine the cost of an adequate public education and then fully fund it. We think the answer is clearly “no.” But that question was treated as settled law in this case, so we’ll skip that argument here.)
The plaintiff school districts argued that the state spent only $4,100 per-pupil on base adequacy aid. The state should give districts a minimum of $9,929 per student, the then-superintendent of the ConVal district asserted, basing the figure on her own calculation of what her district spends.
This, by the way, is far below the $26,320.12 districts actually spent on average (including local and federal funding) in the 2023-24 school year. The question was not whether New Hampshire public school students were receiving an adequately funded education—only whether the state paid a large enough share of the costs.
Superior Court judge David Ruoff had taken the competing numbers, done some (hilariously bad) back-of-the-envelope math, and concluded that a conservative estimate of the minimum cost of an adequate education was precisely $7,356.01. Amazingly, the Supreme Court accepted this figure. And that doomed the plaintiff districts’ hope of receiving a major windfall from the state.
Instead of a ruling ordering an increase in state aid so large that it would require a new state tax, the districts won a ruling that obligates the state to spend only $247.22 more per pupil than it has committed to spending in the Fiscal Year 2026.
That’s right.
The state’s adequacy formula at issue in this trial consisted of four parts: $4,100 in base aid followed by three additional categories of “differentiated aid.” Those three additional categories added up to $5,200.
In their dissent, Supreme Court Justices Melissa Countway and James Donovan pointed out that the statute counts all four parts of the formula in its calculation of adequate education aid.
They argued, correctly, that the entire formula—not just the base amount of $4,100—counts as adequate education spending by the state. Unfortunately, the other justices bought the plaintiffs’ incorrect argument that for the purposes of determining the state’s constitutional obligation, only 1/4 of the formula should count.
Using the entire formula, the state has already appropriated $5,392.50 per student for Fiscal Year 2026. But the state’s spending doesn’t end there. Including all other state aid to local public school districts, the state has appropriated $7,108.79 per student for FY26.
The court rejected the lower court’s order that the state had to begin paying $7.356.01 per pupil immediately. That effectively returns to legislators the decisions regarding when and how to meet this court-imposed financial obligation.
One way to meet that obligation would be to simply reclassify all current spending as base adequacy, eliminate the differentiated aid categories, tack on an additional $247.22 per student ($37.6 million based on enrollment of 151,990) and be done. The $37.6 million could be raised by slightly bumping up the Statewide Education Property Tax, which the court last month ruled constitutional.
Legislative leadership will rightly be annoyed with the ruling’s clear encroachment on legislative authority. But lawmakers had feared a ruling that would put them on the hook for something closer to $400 million-$500 million annually. An order to pay $9,929 per student would have required raising an additional $428.7 million a year over what the state spends now.
From a purely mathematical perspective, this ruling amounts to a loss for both sides. The state is ordered to find some additional money, but districts don’t get the massive windfall some had hoped to win.
Two fundamental problems remain. 1. The fundamentally flawed Claremont interpretation of the state constitution remains intact. 2. The courts accepted the fallacious reasoning that the cost of a public service can be determined by looking at how much money monopoly providers chose to spend. Those errors persist and legislators should addressed them in the future when circumstances permit.
