Schools argue Brownback tax cuts caused unconstitutional funding

School districts challenging Gov. Sam Brownback’s block-grant education funding argued Friday that money matters and that Brownback’s tax cuts are the main reason there’s not enough money to constitutionally fund schools.

In Friday’s brief to the Kansas Supreme Court, school districts lawyer Alan Rupe blasted the Legislature and governor for putting tax cuts, including a zero tax rate for certain business owners, ahead of funding public schools.

“There are many options available to the State to fund education,” Rupe’s brief said. “For example, the State has lost $920 million annually as a result of the 2012 tax cuts.

“Simply repealing the tax cuts would more than cover the cost of increasing education funding to Kansas schools.”

The filing is the latest broadside in the long-running Gannon school finance case, in which the Wichita, Hutchinson, Kansas City and Dodge City school districts have alleged that school funding is too low to meet the state’s constitutional mandate to provide suitable funding for education.

In a special legislative session in June, the Legislature solved part of the problem when it agreed to provide $38 million to cure inequity in the distribution of school funding.

But the potentially larger question of the overall adequacy of the funding remains before the Supreme Court.

Specifically at issue is Senate Bill 7, which essentially froze funding at 2014 levels and distributed it in “block grants” to school districts.

The idea was that that would create a two-year bridge for the Legislature to craft a new finance formula that would require fewer dollars than the old one but still meet court muster.

Rupe’s brief alleges that the Legislature has delayed adequately funding schools too long already.

“Year after year, Kansas students are given the same message: we will resolve this issue ‘soon,’ ” Rupe wrote. “For Kansas students, ‘soon’ cannot come soon enough.”

The brief said schools were adequately funded for only about two years of this decade, a period after the Legislature agreed to increase funding in an earlier court case but before lawmakers started cutting funding in response to the recession.

Rupe wrote that students who started school in 2009 and 2010, when cuts began, are now in seventh grade “without ever enjoying the benefit of a constitutionally adequate education.”

“Kansas students deserve more than a few years’ worth of a constitutionally-appropriate education nestled between court cases and cost studies; the Constitution demands more.”

Throughout the case, the court has largely deferred remedies to the Legislature, setting guidelines but resisting ordering any specific amount of funding.

Rupe’s brief said it’s time for the court to order a school finance fix and disregard any argument from the state’s side that there’s not enough money to do it.

“Throughout this litigation, the State has consistently defended the inadequacy of the current system with arguments that it is the economy – and not the State – that is to blame for the underfunding,” Rupe wrote. “To the extent the State attempts to plead poverty again, as it has in the past, that argument should be disregarded again.”

This story was originally published August 12, 2016 at 6:54 PM with the headline "Schools argue Brownback tax cuts caused unconstitutional funding."