Kansas City, Mo. ? Kansas lawmakers won’t be the only ones in the country struggling this year with how to comply with court decisions that order changes in how public schools are funded.

Widely considered the next generation of civil rights litigation, the type of lawsuit that led to the Kansas ruling is similar to dozens of other cases filed across the country during the past decade. Since 2002, the high courts in Kansas and four other states have sided with the plaintiffs in school funding challenges, with the cases resulting in large education spending increases or proposed increases.

In Kansas, the state Supreme Court has given the Legislature until April 12 to increase funding and make other changes to meet a “constitutional duty” to improve public education.

In Montana, lawmakers are in the same situation after the state Supreme Court in November upheld a lower court’s ruling that said the state’s system of funding public schools was unconstitutional. A new funding method must be in place by October 2005.

And though the Texas Supreme Court has yet to hear a school funding challenge, lawmakers in the state plan to consider major changes during their upcoming session.

In Arkansas, lawmakers agreed last year to a landmark education overhaul that included school mergers, a revised $2.7 billion school-funding formula and $370 million annually in additional money for schools. The Legislature is making upgrading school facilities and equipment its top priority for the session that starts Monday.

In California, officials agreed in August to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit targeting shoddy facilities, outdated textbooks and unqualified teachers for nearly $1 billion.

The cases are an outgrowth of an experiment that started in the 1970s after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in a Detroit school desegregation case. The plaintiffs wanted to use the suburbs to help integrate the mainly black student body, but the court said no. Without the suburbs, school integration proved elusive, said Chris Hansen, a desegregation attorney for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.

“At that point, people said let’s try something different,” Hansen said.

In the place of school desegregation cases, attorneys began to focus on the system of using property taxes to pay for schools. They argued children from low-income families were disadvantaged by the system because property taxes raise more money in wealthy communities than poor communities.