Topeka ? Republican leaders of the Kansas House and Senate said Tuesday that they think it’s time to overhaul the state’s school funding formula. But they said there are no specific plans on the table yet for doing that.

Leaders were in Topeka Tuesday for a meeting of the Legislative Coordinating Council, a group that makes policy decisions for the Legislature when the House and Senate are not in session.

“Certainly we’re looking at it,” Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, said. “It’s taking most of our state money and there’s concern that we can’t continue with automatic increases that are folded in the formula.”

This year’s budget calls for spending about $3 billion on K-12 education, or roughly half of the state’s entire general fund budget.

Court ruling pending

Rep. Jene Vickrey, R-Louisburg, the House majority leader, said he believes the current formula, which has been in place since 1992, no longer works.

“It’s a horrible formula,” he said. “We give money to school districts with all these strings attached. We have multiple mandates that we don’t fund. You know, it’s time to open it up to get a common sense plan that works for the students, the teachers and educators and our state.”

Their comments echoed recent statements by Gov. Sam Brownback and his budget director Shawn Sullivan, who have said that parts of the formula sometimes result in huge, automatic spending increases that are beyond the Legislature’s control and which they say the state cannot afford.

But the legislators’ comments also came at a time when the entire state is awaiting a ruling from a three-judge panel in Topeka that is weighing whether Kansas is currently spending enough on public schools.

A decision on that issue is expected within days. An aide in the office of Judge Franklin Theis, presiding judge on the panel, said the decision will not come this week, but could come as early as next week.

That panel ruled in 2013 that the current funding was unconstitutional and ordered an estimated $450 million in additional base funding. But the Kansas Supreme Court set that ruling aside in March and remanded the issue to the panel to be judged by a different standard.

The basics of the formula were adopted in 1992 in response to an earlier school finance lawsuit. It was a sweeping overhaul that shifted most of the burden for funding schools to the state instead of local districts.

It established a uniform system of funding schools on a per-pupil basis that was largely funded by a uniform statewide property tax levy, but it also gave local districts some latitude to add additional money raised through local property taxes for what are called “local option budgets.”

Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley of Topeka served in the House in 1992 when the current formula was crafted, and he said there’s nothing wrong with the formula itself.

“The formula works if it’s funded adequately, and the Legislature has shown over the years that we have not funded it adequately,” Hensley said. “That to me is the real crux of the matter.”

Complicated, changing formula

The formula has grown more complex since it was adopted. Much of that is due to a complicated system of “weightings” that count different categories of students differently to reflect the higher cost of educating students who live in poverty and students who speak languages other than English.

The formula also provides so-called “equalization” funding to subsidize the local option budgets, capital outlay budgets and the bond and interest payments for less-wealthy districts.

Conservative legislators have complained for years that those equalization formulas sometimes result in huge, automatic increases whenever local districts decide to raise their discretionary budgets or issue new bonds. And during the Great Recession, lawmakers scaled back equalization for local option budgets while eliminating it altogether for capital outlay budgets.

As part of its ruling in March, the Supreme Court ordered roughly $119 million in additional equalization funding, saying the cutbacks enacted by the Legislature were unconstitutional because they deprived students in less-wealthy districts of access to comparable educational programs, at comparable tax rates, as those who live in wealthier districts.

Vickery said there is wide support in the House for overhauling the formula, but that may be too large of a task to accomplish on one session.

“I think every legislator has a preferred plan that fits their districts, but that’s when the politics gets involved and you sit around huge conference tables that then break into smaller groups and everybody has a plan,” he said.

The Kansas Association of School Boards issued a statement recently saying lawmakers need to be careful about changing the formula.

“Changes in these programs could threaten equal educational opportunities across Kansas school districts and threaten the ability of local voters to enhance their local schools,” KASB said. “A major reason for growth in these aid programs has been the limited funding for base state aid for Kansas classrooms.”