Topeka ? Officials with the state’s largest teachers union say the union still intends to file a legal challenge against the repeal of teacher tenure rights in Kansas, possibly later this week.

“I believe that it will be sometime this week, though I am not sure exactly when,” said an assistant for the Kansas National Education Association said in an email Monday.

On June 9, KNEA announced that it would file a lawsuit “before the end of June.” But that announcement did not specify what the nature of the legal challenge would be.

In April, Kansas lawmakers passed a bill that repeals teacher tenure rights, also known as administrative due process rights, for public K-12 teachers. Before that, teachers with three to five years of work experience in a district were entitled to an administrative due process hearing before they could be summarily fired or nonrenewed for the following year.

KNEA and other teachers groups have used that issue as a launching pad for their efforts to mobilize voters in the 2014 election campaign. But supporters of the law have said the old tenure rule made it too difficult to fire ineffective teachers and that by repealing the law the issue of awarding protection to veteran teachers is now in the hands of local school boards.

In May, the Lawrence Education Association, a group within KNEA that bargains on behalf of local teachers, reached agreement with the Lawrence school board on a new contract that provides a modified form of tenure protection.

Under the new local plan, veteran teachers are still entitled to a hearing before an independent hearing officer, but the final decision on whether to fire or retain a teacher will be up to the school board.

Both state and local union officials have said the Legislature’s action constitutes a “taking,” without compensation, of a vested property right interest that current veteran teachers have in their existing contracts.

Earlier this year, a state court in North Carolina upheld that argument, striking down a 2013 law in that state that greatly modified tenure rights.

But in June, a California judge declared that state’s tenure system unconstitutional, saying it violates students’ constitutional right to a quality education because the system in California had made it virtually impossible to fire tenured teachers.