It remained unclear late Saturday afternoon how the Kansas school finance crisis would be resolved.

What was clear, however, and has been clear for several days is that this special legislative session was an embarrassment for the state.

If the Kansas Legislature is able to forward any school finance legislation to the governor it will have done so despite the childish antics of some powerful state leaders who were more focused on their own political agenda than on the future of the state.

This session should have been about schools and how to properly fund them, period. That was the reason the special session was called and it was the only urgent piece of business on the agenda. Any problems state legislators had with the Supreme Court or the Kansas Constitution should have been deferred until the regular session next January, when they could have been dealt with in a thoughtful and productive way.

Instead, House Speaker Doug Mays, with an assist from Atty. Gen. Phill Kline, decided to draw a “line in the sand,” by insisting that legislators pass a constitutional amendment to limit the powers of the Supreme Court before approving any additional school funding.

Kline fanned the flames before the session started, saying the court was out of control and that Republicans had an obligation to rein the justices in. Is it any wonder he had a less that sympathetic audience at the end of last week when he asked justices for an extension on their July 1 deadline to produce a school funding plan?

Mays led the charge in the House, delaying votes and using administrative maneuvers to try to force House Democrats and even some fellow Republicans who support education to vote for the constitutional amendment. If you approve the amendment, they were told, we’ll approve additional school funding. Is it any wonder they didn’t feel like trusting the speaker’s promise?

The speaker’s answer was to write a provision into the school finance bill preventing it from taking effect if a constitutional amendment wasn’t passed. It looked a lot like legislative blackmail.

Even after the Supreme Court announced Saturday afternoon that it would consider keeping Kansas schools closed if it wasn’t satisfied with the Legislature’s action, House leaders continued to beat the drum, seeking alternative amendments that might gain approval. Anything to make the court look bad and allow the Republican holdouts to save face.

It will be interesting to see how his conduct in the special session will affect the political future of Speaker Mays, the only announced Republican candidate for the governor’s race in 2006.

It is our firm hope that by the time this newspaper was delivered this morning that the Kansas Legislature had approved a school funding package and avoided any constitutional measures that could be damaging to the state.

It seems like little enough to ask from a group of elected lawmakers who are supposed to have the best interests of the state and its school children at heart.