The school districts challenging Kansas on school finance won again today in the Kansas Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court issued an opinion today that the new school finance law passed in 2017 by the Kansas Legislature violated the adequacy requirements of the Kansas constitution.
“It’s a great day for Kansas kids,” said attorney Alan Rupe, representing the school district plaintiffs, which included the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools.
However, the decision doesn’t necessarily mean the school districts will get any more funding this year than was already appropriated by the Legislature, as the state has a long deadline to meet the court’s requirements. It will depend on when the Legislature decides to consider the issue, Rupe said, adding that the Legislature is free to call a special session if it sees fit.
The court is giving the state until April 30, 2018, to tell the court whether a new law to remedy the situation would be constitutional. The court plans to rule by June 30, 2018, on the new school finance law that the Legislature will pass next year.
That long amount of time makes the victory somewhat “bittersweet,” according to Rupe. However, he said he found it very encouraging that the court stated that after June 30, “We will not allow ourselves to be placed in the position of being complicit actors in the continuing deprivation of a constitutionally adequate and equitable education owed to hundreds of thousands of Kansas school children.”
“Nearly one-quarter of all Kansas public school students (and higher numbers of harder-to-educate students) are currently failing to meet the state’s standards and are being denied a constitutional education,” Rupe stated. “While we are hopeful that the Legislature will comply with its obligation, we are disappointed that the relief for Kansas public schoolchildren will not come sooner.”
Besides the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools, the school districts challenging school finance included Wichita, Dodge City and Hutchinson.
The Legislature increased school funding by $293 million in 2017, but attorneys for the school districts have said in the past that is only about one-third of what is actually needed. Rupe said the court’s opinion is that between $893 million and $1.2 billion is needed.
“The Legislature and governor cut taxes, to the tune of $500-some million,” he said. “And resources were taken out. They need to put the resources back, and we’ll be pretty close to getting the problem solved.”
The Gannon case originally was filed in 2010. Issues in the case were broken into adequacy and equity, with the equity portion fixed earlier.
In the decision today, the court said school districts could not use capital outlay funds for utility expenses and property and casualty insurance because districts have a varying ability to pay the expenses from capital outlay funds. Also, the law that allows some school districts to face a protest and election in order to raise the local option budget limits is inequitable, according to the court.
The new method for calculating supplemental state aid using a district’s preceding year’s local option budget percentage, and a new method for computing at-risk funding, to the gain of only two school districts, were found to worsen wealth-based differences in violation of the constitution.
Today’s Supreme Court decision included some dissenting opinions, including Justices Lee Johnson and Eric Rosen, who would have given the Legislature only until the end of 2017 to come up with a new school finance plan.
Justice Dan Biles would not have given the state that much time. “It is unacceptable to tolerate even temporarily the inequities this court has today determined violate the Kansas Constitution,” Justice Biles wrote in a dissent.
See the court decision online at http://www.kscourts.org/Cases-and-Opinions/opinions/SupCt/2017/20171002/113267.pdf.
See earlier stories about the Gannon case at:
https://wyandotteonline.com/kansas-supreme-court-justices-hammer-state-lawyers-with-school-funding-questions/
https://wyandotteonline.com/kansas-supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-kck-school-district-in-gannon-case/
https://wyandotteonline.com/explore-the-history-behind-rose-standards-central-to-kansas-school-funding-fight/