Kansans don’t have time to waste seeing lawmakers debate bigoted “bathroom” resolutions aimed at transgender students, as Speaker Ray Merrick and Senate President Susan Wagle have promoted in recent days. It gives state lawmakers until June 30th to come up with a solution that “minimizes the treat of disruptions in funding for education”.
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Lawyer Alan Rupe said Friday that the Legislature needs to reconvene to address the problems identified by the court. It specifically dealt with so-called “equalization aid” that is used to subsidize the capital outlay and local option budgets of districts with less property wealth than others so they don’t have to levy higher property taxes to raise comparable amounts of money.
But attorneys for the school districts argued that legislators were obligated either to boost the state’s overall spending on schools to help poor districts, or to redistribute existing dollars from wealthy districts to poor ones.
“We will carefully consider the implications of the Court’s ruling and its disregard for the proper role of the Kansas legislature”. It also struck down a so-called “severability” clause that said if any part of the formula is found unconstitutional, the court should assume that the Legislature would have passed the rest of the bill anyway.
In Februrary, justices ruled that the block grant system was unconstitutionally inequitable because of disparities in locally generated operation funding and building construction money the state provides to poorer school districts. The court is engaging in political brinksmanship with this ruling, and the cost will be borne by our students.
“The court has yet again demonstrated it is the the most political body in the state of Kansas”.
The court rejected some education funding changes enacted by the Republican-dominated Legislature earlier this year.
The opinion goes out of its way to to put the onus on lawmakers should public schools close. It would harm the large Kansas City, Kan., School District, which has led the fight against the Legislature’s recent funding plans. “Frankly, I find their actions disgraceful”.
Four of the six justices appointed by previous governors are on the ballot in November to determine whether they stay on the bench. The justices said in an unsigned order that lawmakers did not fully comply with an order in February to improve funding for poor schools. The justices said that unless the problems are fixed, the state won’t have an acceptable system for distributing its more than $4 billion in annual aid.
“As we explained in more detail in (March), the inability of Kansas schools to operate would not be because this court would have ordered them closed”, the court said in a 47-page near-unanimous decision.
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The Kansas Supreme Court Friday handed down its latest ruling in the school finance case.
