Topeka ? In October 1991, a Shawnee County judge declared the state’s scheme for funding schools unconstitutional.

Lawmakers scrambled into action, scrapping the system for distributing aid to local districts and writing a new formula, hoping to better meet the needs of 450,000 students.

Thirteen years later, Shawnee District Judge Terry Bullock again has found the state’s scheme for distributing state aid to Kansas school districts unconstitutional. Tuesday, he ruled that schools could not reopen after June 30 unless legislators fixed the problems.

But this time, state officials are challenging the judge’s opinion, seeking the Kansas Supreme Court’s say before acting.

“These kind of history lessons need to be taught to us all from time to time,” Bullock said during a recent interview. “We went through this in the early 1990s. In time, that institutional knowledge goes away.”

Bullock said the 1991 case was a question of whether the state was providing school districts with adequate resources and whether students were presented with an opportunity to learn. It was a matter of enough books, teachers and chalk, not the quality of learning that was taking place.

Legislators tweaked the 1992 formula during the following decade.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius served in the House of Representatives in 1992 when the present law was written. In 1992, legislators were focused on setting school-finance policy and not letting the courts dictate it — the opposite of now, she said.

“Our initiative then was to make policy in the Statehouse and not the courthouse,” she said.

Republican leaders said this time, the issue was too complex to address in one session without knowing whether the final product would pass Supreme Court muster.

“I am confident that the Bullock edict will be discarded in part or in total,” said Senate President Dave Kerr, R-Hutchinson.

House Speaker Doug Mays, R-Topeka, added that none of the nearly two dozen proposals this session would have satisfied all of Bullock’s concerns.

Two years after the school-finance law’s enactment, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional — brushing aside challenges from school districts unhappy with how the legislative debate turned out.

The 1992 law provided for local-option budgets, funded with local property taxes, allowing local school boards and voters to expand course offerings or provide other extras, by spending up to 25 percent of their total state aid.

Twelve years later, local option budgets are still an issue, but schools now rely more heavily on local property taxes for basic expenditures.

Meanwhile, only three Supreme Court justices remain from 1994, when the court ruled that the formula was constitutional. Some legislators and education officials believe new justices could bring a new result, including a ruling that agrees with Bullock’s.

The total school population has risen from 450,000 to 467,000, and the number of Hispanic, poor and special education students has risen dramatically. Hispanic students have grown from 23,000 in 1992 to more than 50,000 in 2004, creating challenges for districts with limited resources to provide services, particularly bilingual education.

Bullock said in his December 2003 ruling that the state formula was unconstitutional because there was no rational basis for distributing funds and that the formula’s unfairness helped widen the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their affluent and white counterparts.

He also said having schools rely on local option budgets was unfair to poor districts, which cannot raise as much money to address needs that are similar — or even more pressing, in some cases — to those present in 1991.

“Things get decided, the hard work gets done, then we slide back to our old ways,” Bullock said.