Kansas Supreme Court deciding whether to take school finance appeal

? A three-judge district court panel in Shawnee County has postponed a hearing this week in the ongoing school finance case, allowing time for the Kansas Supreme Court to decide if it wants to take up an immediate appeal in the lawsuit.

The case, Gannon v. Kansas, could have a profound impact on the state’s budget in future years because funding for K-12 education accounts for roughly half of the state’s entire $6 billion general fund budget.

A hearing had been set for Thursday on motions from both the state and the plaintiffs to clarify the court’s ruling in January, which said overall funding of public schools in Kansas is unconstitutionally inadequate.

That decision reaffirmed the panel’s earlier ruling in 2013 when it ordered the state to increase base funding for schools by an estimated $442 million a year.

But a few weeks after filing that motion to clarify, Attorney General Derek Schmidt filed an appeal of the panel’s ruling with the Kansas Supreme Court, asking the high court to take jurisdiction over the case.

On Tuesday, attorneys for the plaintiff school districts filed their response, saying the three-judge panel should keep jurisdiction for the time being.

“The more reasoned procedure would be to allow the trial court to rule on state’s motion, then our motion, then proceed to the appeal,” plaintiffs attorney John Robb said Tuesday.

The plaintiffs’ latest filing came in response to a Supreme Court order late Monday, giving them one day to respond to the state’s request for the high court to take over jurisdiction of the case.

Meanwhile, another party is attempting to intervene in the matter. Also late Monday, the Shawnee Mission school district in Johnson County filed a motion with the three-judge panel, arguing that neither the state nor the plaintiffs were representing the interests of all 286 school districts in Kansas.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are primarily four school districts — Wichita, Kansas City, Hutchinson and Dodge City — who argue that the Legislature has underfunded the existing school finance formula.

But Shawnee Mission, located in the middle-class suburbs of Kansas City, is arguing that the current formula should be overturned because it does not treat all schools equally, resulting in that district receiving substantially less money per pupil than the plaintiff districts.

“This is not a trivial wealth disparity but a dramatically inequitable one,” Shawnee Mission argued in its brief. “And the disparity is entirely state-created, as contrasted with naturally occurring wealth disparities. It makes U.S.D. 512 revenue-poor in comparison to Plaintiffs and others on the one metric that matters most: money to spend on classroom instruction.”

But Robb said that argument is flawed because it does not take into account the “weighting” factors in the formula, which provide additional money for hard-to-teach students such as those from low-income households or non-English speaking families.

“Since they have some of the lowest-cost children to educate, they don’t get resources due to the weightings,” Robb said. “It is disingenuous to misrepresent that to the public as they’re doing.”

Even if the Supreme Court takes the appeal immediately, attorneys in the case say it is unlikely that a ruling would come before the start of the next school year. At the earliest, they have said, a decision could come in late 2015 or early 2016, with funding implications for the 2016-2017 school year.