Attorneys hired by 54 Kansas school districts began arguing Monday that the Kansas Legislature must increase funding for the public schools to meet constitutional requirements.
When the same arguments were used before Judge Terry Bullock in 2006, he decided in favor of the school districts and his decision was upheld. As a result, the state increased school funding by almost $1 billion.
Since then, however, school funding has been slashed due to falling state revenues caused by the Great Recession.
The school district lawyers — veterans Alan Rupe and John Robb — will base their argument on the constitutional requirement that the public schools be “adequately” funded. The state will counter that funding for schools, as for all other public purposes, must be tailored to fit available revenues.
In the end, the courts must decide if the Legislature can be required to raise taxes to comply with a constitutional requirement.
Rupe and Robb will find it easy to show that the drastic reductions in school funding over the past four years have left the schools inadequately funded. If the criteria to be used include the performance of Kansas students against world academic standards, they could make a strong case that pouring an additional billion into the system still left the system inadequate.
Since then, however, lawmakers have cut public school system sharply, trimming about $18,000 a year from every Kansas classroom.
In the 2012 session just ended, spending on schools was increased slightly — not nearly enough to bring the K-12 budget back up to 2007 levels — and the lawmakers felt so flush that they slashed taxes to the bone, sharply reducing the state’s ability to follow up next year with significant increases in spending on schools — or anything else.
Unless the tax cuts produce the economic miracle predicted by its backers, a court decision that Kansas must at least spend as much on its public schools next year and into the future as it did in the pre-recession years, will require tax increases large enough to restore state revenues to those levels.
Such a court decision would be resisted mightily by Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies in the tax-cutting Legislature and produce truly nasty confrontations.
A FAR BETTER outcome would be for the people of Kansas to tell Gov. Brownback that they want top-notch public schools for their children and are willing to pay for them. The same message should be sent to the legislators and those who reject it should be defeated. The education of children and young adults is the primary task assigned to state government. About 52 percent of the state budget is devoted to the public schools. Another 20 percent or so is spent on higher education.
When the state fails to meet the obligations it has to its students, it has failed to perform its primary role.
Kansas is failing its students today. It shouldn’t be necessary to haul the Legislature into court to make the point.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
