Court ruling on school funding no surprise

Surprising no one, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that K-12 school funding is inequitably distributed among districts and therefore unconstitutional. It called for a remedy by June 30.

Now it’s time for the GOP-led Legislature and Gov. Sam Brownback to decide how to fulfill their duty to pay for public education and avoid a court shutdown of schools. The House and Senate budget plans won’t suffice, as they barely balanced anyway.

Finding a proper K-12 fix could mean a longer session than desired in this election year. It may necessitate looking for more revenue in places currently viewed as off-limits, such as the 2012 law that exempted pass-through business income from state income taxes or perhaps the state’s myriad sales-tax exemptions.

It should not involve leaning harder on the regressive sales tax, and Kansas’ highest-in-the-nation rate on food.

State leaders invited this outcome by ignoring their obligations under an earlier court ruling. They followed up recession-related K-12 spending cuts not by restoring funding levels but by passing those excessive tax cuts four years ago, hobbling the state budget.

They also seemed to think they could outsmart the court by repealing the 23-year-old school-finance formula and switching to two-year block grants, and by newly including among state K-12 funding totals the pension payments that districts cannot use for daily operations. The creative accounting didn’t work.

Everybody is sick of the school-finance wars in Kansas. The Montoy case dragged on for seven years; this Gannon lawsuit is at six years and counting, with the adequacy part of the case still pending. But the court is not the problem.

As it said Thursday: “While we do not desire to become a supervisor of the school finance system, neither do we abandon our duty to the people of Kansas under their constitution to review the Legislature’s enactments and to ensure its compliance with its own duty under Article 6.”

As the court also noted, in a decision that took care not to answer the “how much” question, the constitution empowers as well as obligates the Legislature to fund schools suitably – which in this case means equitably. Will it?

This story was originally published February 11, 2016 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Court ruling on school funding no surprise."