Failure to heed the ruling should not be an option at the Statehouse, given the court’s June 30 deadline and the potential for a funding interruption to disrupt preparations for the next school year.
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This time, the stakes are much higher.
Robb said he’s not concerned if legislators want more time to draft a response to the ruling and will have a special session.
The case is Gannon v. Kansas.
A Republican leader in the Kansas Senate says talk among legislators about defying a recent state Supreme Court ruling on education funding is serious.
According to the Kansas State Department of Education, reinstating the old formula would cost about $38 million more than the state appropriated this year.
While legislators revised parts of Kansas’ school funding formula, the changes resulted in no changes in aid for most school districts – and no overall increase in spending for the state. He used a set of Legos in court to demonstrate his rearrangement argument. Rather, it’s about distributing that funding equitably, and the court has been much less specific about what the Legislature needs to do to cure the constitutional problem. The justices gave lawmakers until June 30 to respond or face the possibility that schools would remain closed.
Legislators are considering the issue as ex-pizza magnate Gene Bicknell is asking the state Supreme Court to order the state to refund $42.5 million in income taxes. If they didn’t, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback would have to call a special session in June for lawmakers to consider additional fixes. He referred to the ruling as “political brinksmanship”. Local option budgets are an important source of funding for local school districts, allowing them to supplement state funding with local taxpayer funding. For Wichita Public Schools, what happens next is all about timing. “Shutting down the school system on July 1 would have disastrous effects on our fine public schools and state. We strongly urge our elected leaders to continue working on providing a constitutional system for all of our students and resolve this issue as soon as possible”.
But if the phrase “make suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state” means whatever the Legislature says it means, it means nothing. They used the capital outlay formula to compute state aid for the unrelated LOB funds support.
None of state leaders’ serial excuses has held up, in court or otherwise – such as that schools are amply funded and great, that schools are awful and need wholesale reform, that passing responsible laws is politically hard, and that the problem is really the Supreme Court and especially four of the justices up for retention votes in November.
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The main issue is that property-rich districts can easily raise large amounts of money with relatively small increases in the tax rate, while poor districts have to raise tax rates by much more to generate significant money for schools.
