Apparently, in the eyes of the Kansas Supreme Court, the 2005 Kansas Legislature just didn’t get the message about school finance.

So, on Friday, the justices released a unanimous decision spelling out the details that legislators failed to grasp.

When we said to raise school funding, the justices said, we meant by more than the $142 million the Legislature approved this year. In fact we meant to increase funding by more than twice that amount. You apparently didn’t get that message, legislators, so now you can have a special session and figure out how to provide $285 million in additional school funding. And we need to have that done by July 1 so that local school districts have the money in time to plan their budgets for the next school year.

We also said we wanted additional funding to be distributed in an equitable way that didn’t favor districts with higher property valuations. On the contrary, we find that your plan to allow selected districts to use property taxes to raise their own local option budgets actually “exacerbates the wealth-based disparities between districts.” Therefore, the court is blocking that provision along with provisions to use cost-of-living weighting and “extraordinary declining enrollment” to determine funding.

Are you listening, legislators?

The ruling released Friday is a clear message from the Kansas Supreme Court. Its instructions to the state were to base funding for public schools on the actual costs of providing that education, not on political posturing. Because the only study the court has on record to determine those costs is the Augenblick and Myers report, that’s the only report the justices can use. That report said in 2002, that the state needed to boost education funding by $853 million (adjusted for inflation). The court determined that one-third of that amount was a reasonable increase to mandate for next year.

The Legislature has commissioned a new analysis of school costs by the Division of Legislative Post Audit to be ready by the start of the next session, but the court was unwilling to wait for that study. Further, the court said that if the post audit isn’t completed in a timely fashion or is legally determined not to be a valid cost study or if legislators fail to act on the new study’s findings, the court plans to order full funding (an additional $568 million) of the Augenblick and Myers study.

The mandate for action doesn’t get much clearer than that. Some observers probably will argue that the court is overstepping its authority by so specifically telling legislators what to do, but in the court’s view, when left to their own devices, legislators just didn’t do the job.

It will be interesting now to see how legislative leaders will respond to the court’s mandate. Facing a four-week deadline, lawmakers will have to decide quickly whether to defy the court or call a special session and raise the money. And if raising the money is the answer, they will have to decide what taxes to raise or what spending to cut.

In its ruling the court said “the compelling arguments of immediate need : remind us that we cannot continue to ask current Kansas students to ‘be patient.'” The Kansas Supreme Court clearly believes – as do many Kansans – that the time for patience is past and the time for action has arrived.