Topeka ? The long-awaited decision in the long-running school finance lawsuit will be filed Monday, the Kansas Supreme Court has announced.

The court will post its ruling at 9:30 a.m. Monday at www.kscourts.org.

State leaders, educators, parents and students have been eagerly awaiting the decision in one of the most vexing disputes in modern Kansas history.

“It is a relief we’re going to get this before the legislative session begins,” Senate Majority Leader-elect Derek Schmidt, R-Independence, said Thursday. The session starts Jan. 10.

The dispute is over the finance system that governs the spending of $2.7 billion per year on elementary and secondary public schools.

Plaintiffs argued and a lower court agreed that the way Kansas distributes school funds discriminates against minorities and students with disabilities in primarily poorer school districts.

That court also ruled that the state was shortchanging all students and gave the state until June 30 to fix the finance system or it would shut down schools.

The state appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, which stayed the lower court order and held oral arguments in August. The lawsuit was filed in 1999.

Earlier this week, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said in an interview with the Lawrence Journal-World that she hoped the state Supreme Court would give the Legislature direction and that lawmakers would get busy on the issue.

“I’m hopeful their missing-in-action attitude will end once we get a ruling from the court,” Sebelius said. “The Legislature was sued in 1999. Five years later, no progress has really been made in addressing any of the issues in the lawsuit that have now been backed up by a district court judge.”

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Schmidt, an attorney, didn’t want to speculate on what the Kansas Supreme Court might decide. He said similar school finance lawsuits in other states had produced a “mixed bag” of court rulings.

“Some courts have been very prescriptive. Some have been hands-off. I don’t have any tea leaves into what’s going on at the Judicial Center (the Kansas Supreme Court office building),” he said.

Regardless what the court decides, Schmidt said the Legislature needed to increase school funding. Base state aid per students has remained at the same level for four years.

Numerous proposals to increase taxes for schools were rejected during the 2004 legislative session.

Schmidt said because of growing state revenues, schools could get an increase this session even without a tax increase.