Fair funding group continues to grow
By MICHAEL STRAND
Special to The Hays Daily News
A decision on filing a new school funding lawsuit could come as early as next month as more school districts statewide join Schools for Fair Funding and pledge to help fund a new court battle.
"Our membership is changing rapidly," said Fred Kaufman, superintendent of Hays USD 489 and president of Schools for Fair Funding.
At the beginning of this school year, Kaufman said, the organization had 13 member districts. As of Monday, it had just fewer than 40, with many school boards around the state considering joining at their meetings Monday night.
Among them were the Brookville-Ell-Saline and Gypsum-Southeast of Saline school boards; both districts decided to join the group Monday night.
The Wichita School District -- the largest in the state -- also opted to become a full-fledged voting member of the group. The organization originally was composed of midsize districts, such as Salina.
"It's not a matter of wealthy districts, or poor districts, or of size," Kaufman said. "We have very large districts and very small districts. We're all in the same situation of not having the money to do what we've been doing for children."
The fact that Schools for Fair Funding is recruiting districts of all sizes indicates a future lawsuit might be based on different claims.
The 1999 lawsuit rested on two basic claims; that the state did not adequately fund public schools -- and the money wasn't fairly distributed, with midsize districts getting less than they needed.
This time, "the notion of equity has kind of dropped by the wayside," said Wichita attorney Alan Rupe, who represents Schools for Fair Funding.
"One of the arguments before was that enough money wasn't being provided for the students who needed it the most," Kaufman said. "That was corrected by the (school funding) formula, and the equity issue has gone away. The adequacy issue hasn't."
As a result of the 1999 school funding case -- commonly called the Montoy case -- districts got additional money to fund additional programs for at-risk students, generally identified as poor and minorities.
But, Kaufman noted, cuts to school funding during the past year have especially taken their toll on funding for those at-risk programs.
"When you take $100 per student off the funding base, you're taking $150 off for an at-risk student," he said. "It really hurts districts with lots of at-risk students."
As a result of the Montoy case, the state added close to $1 billion to school funding during the past three years.
Last year, base funding was $4,433 a student and was set to increase to $4,597 for the current school year.
But as tax revenues have declined in the past year, the Legislature and the governor have approved four rounds of cuts to schools and the rest of state government; funding now sits at $4,218 a student. With revenue still declining, more cuts are expected.
"The notion in the original Montoy case, and the Newton School District case 10 years earlier, was equity," Rupe said. "The mid-size school districts' funding, compared to larger and smaller districts, created a lot of inequity. This will be an issue of adequacy."
Rupe said it's also possible that instead of filing a new lawsuit, Schools for Fair Funding might ask the Kansas Supreme Court to simply reopen the Montoy case.
That would be the "faster, quicker, cheaper way," Rupe said, as a wholly new lawsuit would have to start in district court, and likely work its way through a lengthy appeals process before ending up at the Kansas Supreme Court.
But reopening the Montoy case might not be easy, Rupe said.
"One of the issues is there's not a lot of precedent for doing that," he said. "There's not a mechanism in the appellate procedure to do that."
There is an example from Arkansas, Rupe said.
Several years ago, the state of Arkansas also was being sued over school funding, and the case was resolved when the Legislature there drew up a plan to increase funding during the next three or four years, Rupe said.
"Then about a year later, the Legislature reneged, and the court there reopened the case" on its own, he said.
The Hays district last week became one of the first in the state to approve a resolution supporting renewed legal action.
That resolution states a district supports legal action, and that legal action will be taken once districts representing a total enrollment of 100,000 students have approved the resolution.
"Not many of our member districts have adopted the resolution," Kaufman said.
That 100,000-student critical mass is intended to keep the legal costs for individual districts low; if legal action is taken, member districts will be asked to pay $5 a student, up from the $2 a student for membership dues. For Salina, with about 7,200 students, that would be $36,000 a year. For the Hays district with 3,256 students, it would be about $16,280 a year.
The 1999 Montoy case commenced after districts representing 50,000 students had signed on.
Kaufman said he expects to have enough districts on board by December.