The Lawrence school district has postponed any further discussions with the local teachers union regarding a new contract for next year until issues surrounding school finance are resolved by the Kansas Legislature and Gov. Sam Brownback, officials said.

The two sides were scheduled to meet again on Monday, but the district sent out notice this week that it is postponing any further meeting until at least May 5, by which time the Legislature is expected to have finished its work.

Lawmakers are under a Kansas Supreme Court order to resolve equity problems in two parts of the school funding formula by July 1. Those involve payments the state makes to subsidize the capital outlay and local option budgets of poor school districts to keep their property tax rates roughly the same as wealthier districts.

On April 6, lawmakers passed such a bill. But it also reconfigured the way local option budgets are calculated in a way that would cost the Lawrence district about $2 million a year in spending authority.

That bill also contained a controversial provision that would repeal an existing law that gives veteran school teachers the right to an administrative due process hearing before they can be summarily fired, a right commonly known as “tenure.”

Gov. Sam Brownback has not yet signed that bill. And according to a story published in the Wichita Eagle this week, he has given conflicting statements to different audiences about whether he intends to sign it.

At the last negotiating meeting April 7, negotiators for the Lawrence Education Association, the local bargaining unit for teachers, said that if the tenure repeal becomes law, they will seek to add additional topics to the list of items being negotiated.

Meanwhile, district officials have declined to say how they would respond if the repeal of tenure rights becomes law.

At last Monday’s school board meeting, board members were harshly critical of the finance portion of the bill, which would result in a net loss to Lawrence of about $1.7 million a year, unless the district takes advantage of another provision allowing it to increase its local option budget authority. But even doing that would still leave the district with a net loss of about $343,000 a year, based on this year’s enrollment figures.

Board member Shannon Kimball also criticized the tenure repeal, noting it was added as an amendment to the bill on the floor of the Senate without any opportunity for committee hearings or public input.