Topeka ? The Kansas Supreme Court said Thursday that it will not consider another appeal of the ongoing school finance case until after a three-judge panel in Topeka finishes its deliberations.

In a three-page order released late Thursday, the justices said the district court panel has jurisdiction over all issues in the case, and that Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s appeal of that panel’s latest rulings will have to wait.

That order provided some measure of clarity to the status of a constitutional lawsuit that has grown more complicated by the month.

The case was filed in 2010, after then-Gov. Mark Parkinson, a Democrat, and the Republican-led Legislature began cutting school funding in the wake of the Great Recession. The plaintiffs argued that the cuts made overall school funding unconstitutionally low, and that some of the cuts fell disproportionately on the poorest school districts.

After a trial, the three-judge panel ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on both counts, finding funding levels both inadequate and inequitable. It ordered the state to increase funding by an estimated $450 million to $500 million a year.

Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s equity ruling and ordered the state to increase certain kinds of funding that targets poor districts. But it remanded the adequacy question back to the three-judge panel to be reconsidered using a different standard.

Since then, the case has ballooned in complexity. In December, the panel reaffirmed its earlier ruling and said overall funding was still inadequate. But it said the equity fixes enacted by the Legislature last year had solved that part of the case.

But Kansas lawmakers have since rescinded some of the additional funding they provided last year. And, more importantly, they have repealed the entire school funding formula that had been in place since 1992 and replaced it with a system of block grants.

Now, the plaintiffs are asking the panel to reopen the equity question of the case, arguing that the recent cuts have again disadvantaged poor districts. Also, they have asked the panel to declare the new block grant formula unconstitutional and to issue an injunction to prevent it from going into effect.

In its order Thursday, the Supreme Court did not throw out Schmidt’s appeal, but instead put it on hold until the district court panel issues its rulings.

The next hearing before the panel is scheduled for May 7.