Kansas courts say once again that K-12 education financing is inadequate

A three-judge panel in Kansas said on Tuesday that the state doesn’t meet a constitutional requirement to adequately fund K-12 education. How much is enough? The court won’t say.

A convoluted decision says it’s not up to the court to decide how much the state ought to spend on its schools, only that it’s clear that the current amount isn’t cutting it.

Tuesday’s ruling is the second part of a lengthy battle over school finance in Kansas. Last year, the courts ruled that the state’s funding formula didn’t fund education fairly from one school district to the next. The judges ordered the state to spend an additional $129 million to fix the problem, while leaving the question of overall adequacy to a later date, which arrived on Tuesday.

Unlike last year’s decision, there’s no dollar amount shown in Tuesday’s ruling that would remedy the state’s chronic underfunding of K-12 education. 

That fact, plus the likelihood that the decision could be appealed, means it’s entirely unknown at this point what consequence Tuesday’s ruling has on Kansas’ already cluttered finances. Kansas faces a $279 million budget shortfall in the current year; projections say that could swell to $648 million for the next fiscal year.

The Associated Press reports that Tuesday’s ruling could mean an increase of $548 million to K-12 education. If that’s true, then the state’s ledger would be torn to shreds.

The crisis is mainly the responsibility of Gov. Sam Brownback’s drastic tax cuts in Kansas, which have eliminated state income taxes for nearly 200,000 businesses but have failed to produce any meaningful job growth — certainly not anywhere close enough to make up for the amount of money surrendered by the tax cuts.

The three-judge panel acknowledged the state’s “self-imposed” budget crisis and the school finance decision’s likely impact on it. But it added that the state still cannot shirk its constitutional requirement to adequately fund schools.

“[W]e understand the self-imposed fiscal dilemma now facing the State of Kansas, both with or without this opinion,” the ruling reads. “Since the obligations here declared emanate from our Kansas Constitution, avoidance is not an option.”

The ruling was also critical of the Kansas Legislature for the way it has passed the buck to local school districts to raise their own money in an attempt to meet their own needs. School districts have local option budgets, which is a way to raise more money within their own boundaries up to a certain point. (Most Johnson County districts have reached their LOB limits.) The court’s ruling said shifting the burden to school districts under the illusion of local control was unconstitutional and “substantially threatens the common good of all Kansas children wherever they may reside in Kansas.”
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