Topeka ? The Kansas Supreme Court on Tuesday granted a stay in the ongoing school finance lawsuit and said it would set a schedule soon to hear oral arguments in the case.

The stay means the state does not have to immediately pay an estimated $50 million to school districts whose funding was cut under a new finance formula that lawmakers enacted this year. It also may not have to make immediate provisions to add another $50 million in school funding for the new fiscal year that starts Wednesday.

“We hold that the state has made the basic showing required to support its request for relief,” Chief Justice Lawton Nuss wrote in a one-page order issued shortly after 5 p.m. Tuesday. “Accordingly, this court stays the panel’s memorandum opinion and order of June 26 until our further order or the issuance of our mandate.”

Nuss said the court would set an expedited schedule for briefs and oral arguments on at least one part of the case dealing with “equalization aid” that subsidizes the budgets of districts with less property tax wealth.

Alan Rupe, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said he was not surprised by the decision.

“As we suspected, the Supreme Court stayed the Panel’s Order pending its review of the issues on appeal,” Rupe said in an email statement. “The Court did acknowledge the need for swift resolution of the equity portion of our case, and indicated that an order will soon be issued outlining an expedited briefing schedule and setting an oral argument.”

But the Supreme Court’s order said nothing about the much larger issue at stake in the lawsuit, whether overall funding of public schools is adequate to meet the Kansas Constitution’s requirement for “suitable” funding of public schools.

In March, while the case was still pending before the panel in Shawnee County District Court, Kansas lawmakers enacted a sweeping change to the state’s school funding system, repealing the per-pupil funding formula that had been in place for 23 years and replacing it with a system of block grants.

In addition, the new law overhauled the way two other types of aid are distributed to local districts, the so-called “equalization aid” that subsidizes the local option budgets and capital outlay funds of local districts. That money is meant to equalize property taxes around the state so that districts with less property wealth can raise comparable amounts of money with comparable tax levies as wealthier districts.

Those changes took effect immediately, which meant that most districts, including Lawrence, received less money during the 2014-2015 school year than they anticipated when they wrote their budgets last August.

For the Lawrence school district, the changes meant a loss of about $1.9 million.

On Friday, though, the district court panel struck down those changes and issued an order reinstating the old funding formulas. It also ordered the state to immediately restore the funding that was cut under the new law. The Kansas State Department of Education estimated that amount at $49.6 million, although the plaintiffs in the case estimated it at closer to $54 million.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt quickly appealed the ruling to the Kansas Supreme Court, and on Monday he asked the court to stay the district court’s order.

In his motion, Schmidt called the panel’s order “cynical, calculated and unfortunately ‘political,'” because it was issued less than an hour after the Kansas Legislature formally ended its 2015 session. He also said the court had no constitutional authority to “revive” statutes that the Legislature had repealed, calling that move “unprecedented.”

But in a response brief filed Tuesday afternoon, the plaintiffs argued that the Supreme Court earlier had given the panel authority to craft a remedy if it found the Legislature had failed to comply with its previous order to fix problems it had found in the distribution of equalization aid.

Still, the larger issue at stake in the lawsuit is whether overall funding of public schools is constitutionally adequate.

In January 2013, the district court panel said it was not and ordered the Legislature to restore an estimated $450-$500 million in base per-pupil funding that had been cut since the start of the Great Recession. But the Supreme Court later reversed that ruling and sent it back to the panel to be reconsidered using a different legal standard.

In December, following more hearings, the panel reaffirmed its earlier ruling. Then in March, the Legislature overhauled the school finance formula with the new block grant system.

Following another set of hearings in May, the panel again said that overall funding is unconstitutionally low, but it delayed ordering a remedy on that issue until it can be reviewed again by the Supreme Court.

The court’s order Tuesday granting the stay indicated the justices plan to review the equity issues on an expedited scale. But it did not indicate whether the adequacy issue would be taken up at the same time or handled later as a separate issue.