Kansas Supreme Court stays lower court’s ruling in school-funding case

The Kansas Supreme Court put a hold Tuesday on a lower-court ruling that would have required the state to immediately pay more than $50 million to school districts, including Wichita’s.

The justices stayed a ruling made Friday by a three-judge special school-finance court, which found unconstitutional the block-grant school funding plan passed this year by the Legislature and Gov. Sam Brownback.

In a brief order, the Supreme Court justices said they would stay enforcement of the school court’s orders until they could review them on an expedited basis.

They didn’t immediately announce a schedule for arguments, but the justices expressed a desire to address the issue of fairness in the distribution of money between rich and poor school districts.

“The court recognizes the need for swift resolution of the equity portion of this case,” the justices’ order said.

The stay means the “kids of Kansas will have to wait a bit longer” for more school funding, John Robb, a lawyer representing schools in the case, wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

“I am confident that the trial court order will be upheld on appeal but it will simply take more time,” he added. “This is not unusual or unexpected, as the court normally stays matters while an appeal is pending.”

Sen. Michael O’Donnell, R-Wichita and a member of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, said he also wasn’t surprised the Supreme Court stayed the school panel’s ruling.

“The lower court order was completely unreasonable by expecting us to come up with an additional 50-plus million dollars in two business days,” O’Donnell said.

School districts including Wichita, Kansas City and Hutchinson have sued the state over Senate Bill 7, a law passed this year that repealed the state’s school finance formula and replaced it with block grants based on districts’ 2015 revenue.

The school-finance court ruled that SB 7 violates the state constitution “both in regard to its adequacy of funding and in its change of, and in its embedding of, inequities in the provision of capital outlay state aid and supplemental general state aid.”

Capital outlay is state funding to help finance school buildings, while supplemental general state aid helps property-poor districts maintain rough educational parity with richer districts.

The school court also ruled that the block-grant system, while “promoted as a change and an improvement in K-12 funding … is no more than a freeze on USD operational funding for two years.”

Any purported increase comes “by way of adding in, under the guise of operational funds, Kansas Public Employees Retirement System employer contributions … to the ‘block’ of funds provided,” the school court’s ruling said.

O’Donnell said the purpose of the block grant plan was to give lawmakers a couple of years to come up with a new school finance formula to end years of near-continuous litigation over school funding.

“What the legislative leaders that I’ve been talking to have been discussing is the need that we must work on developing our new finance formula throughout this summer and fall and be ready for some action this coming legislative session,” O’Donnell said.

The Legislature on Friday completed the longest annual session on record, 114 days, and isn’t scheduled to convene again until January.

If the Supreme Court orders changes in school funding before that, it could trigger the need for a special session, which O’Donnell said would be disastrous.

“If we do have a special session, it could literally go months” because of divisions in the Legislature over tax increases, he said.

“We truly risk a situation, in my opinion, where if we do get called up for a special session, that money will come at the expense of Medicaid or will come at the expense of higher education or it will come at the expense of some other agency.”

This story was originally published June 30, 2015 at 5:21 PM with the headline "Kansas Supreme Court stays lower court’s ruling in school-funding case."