Stay on school funding will be short-lived

The Kansas Supreme Court acted Tuesday to stay a three-judge panel’s order that the state immediately put $50 million more into K-12 schools, but the relief is likely to be short-lived.

The executive and legislative branches of government are still on a collision course with the courts, related both to the ongoing Gannon challenge to funding as inadequate and inequitable and the recently passed repeal of the 23-year-old school finance formula in favor of two-year block grants.

No amount of condemnation of “unelected, activist judges” by Gov. Sam Brownback and GOP legislative leaders will change the facts, which are evident not only to school administrators, school boards, teachers and parents across the state but also to the judges on the special panel.

As reflected last week in their ruling that the new block-grant law is inequitable and unconstitutional and their order of additional funding:

•  The block grants are not an improvement but rather a two-year freeze on operational funding that does not account for changing enrollments and rising costs. The bill “does nothing to alleviate the unconstitutional inadequacy of funding ... but, rather, exacerbates it,” they wrote.

▪  The purported increased aid actually is, “under the guise of operational funds, Kansas Public Employees Retirement System employer contributions” and “represents only a new facade for a continuing lack of adequate funding.”

Those mandatory pension payments are laudable, helping right KPERS’ underfunded status. But that money cannot cover day-to-day costs, making Brownback’s talk about “record levels” of money going to schools sound like hollow spin to the districts now cutting jobs, programs and calendar days.

•  The complex weightings and equalization components of the now-defunct formula served to promote equity between property-poor and rich districts, a crucial concern that legislators cannot just set aside for fiscal or political reasons.

The fundamental problem is that the governor and GOP legislative leaders seem to think that whatever level of support they deign to give schools should suffice, no matter the reality in the classrooms or the mandate in the state constitution. Nor does it work to plead poverty, as state leaders chose to slash taxes in 2012 rather than increase the state’s commitment to schools after the recessionary cuts.

Nobody thinks school funding levels are best decided by judges. These legal battles have been a huge waste of resources and time, stretching to seven years in the Montoy case and at 5 1/2 years and counting in the Gannon suit.

But the blame belongs to the governor and Legislature, who’ve calculated that there’s more to be gained politically by screaming about the courts than by fulfilling their constitutional responsibility to fund public schools suitably.

Kansans, most of whom have never seen a conflict in being conservative and pro-schools, must be more than onlookers if the block-grant challenge or the Gannon decision forces a constitutional showdown, special legislative session or both.

For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman

This story was originally published July 1, 2015 at 7:06 PM with the headline "Stay on school funding will be short-lived."