Kansas Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Ty Masterson, right, R-Andover, confers with House Appropriations Committee Chairman Ron Ryckman Jr., R-Olathe, in the Senate ahead of a debate on budget legislation, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/John Hanna)

Topeka ? Rival proposals for helping poor public-school districts emerged Wednesday in the Kansas Legislature, with the chairmen of its two budget committees differing on how much the state would spend to meet a court mandate.

Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Ty Masterson said he’s working on a plan for complying with a Kansas Supreme Court order last month by reallocating existing aid to public schools. The Andover Republican said he hopes it will be drafted yet this week.

The House Appropriations Committee already has agreed to sponsor a plan from Chairman Ron Ryckman Jr., an Olathe Republican. He said his proposal will boost the state’s annual spending on schools by about $37 million, starting with the 2016-17 school year.

Both plans would create winners and losers among the state’s 286 school districts by shifting money to poorer districts. Ryckman said he believes either would be acceptable to the court, which threatened to shut down the state’s public schools unless lawmakers act by July to fix flaws in how the state distributes more than $4 billion a year in aid.

Ryckman said he’ll propose increasing aid to test support for the idea within the GOP-dominated Legislature amid the state’s ongoing budget problems.

“We need to get the process started,” Ryckman said.

Masterson called his plan “realigning the current resources” to meet the Supreme Court’s concerns about state dollars being distributed unfairly.

The senator said he believes that under his plan, about 100 districts would see their state aid increase, while 186 would see a decrease. Ryckman said 79 districts would lose aid under his proposal.

The high court ruled in a lawsuit pursued since 2010 by the Dodge City, Hutchinson, Wichita and Kansas City, Kansas, districts. As part of their ongoing litigation, they challenged a school funding law enacted by Republican lawmakers last year.

The law junked the state’s previous per-pupil formula for distributing aid in favor of stable “block grants” that essentially froze their state aid outside of contributions to teacher pensions.

Gov. Sam Brownback and other Republicans complained that the old formula was too complicated and didn’t put enough money into classrooms. Last year’s law was meant to distribute dollars predictably while lawmakers did a thorough overhaul. The statute expires in July 2017.

But the Supreme Court said last year’s law shorted poor school districts $54 million during the 2014-15 school year, preventing the state from fulfilling a duty under the Kansas Constitution to provide a suitable education for every child.

The high court has yet to rule on whether the state’s total aid for all districts is adequate. A lower court said last year that Kansas needed to boost its annual spending by at least $548 million.

Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, said a plan like Masterson’s that reallocates existing funds won’t survive a court challenge.

“It’s a very bad idea, and it doesn’t come close to complying with the Supreme Court’s order,” Hensley said.

He said the state must boost spending by almost $110 million, the amount the Department of Education estimates poor districts were shorted for the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years under the court’s opinion.

But attorneys for the four school districts in the lawsuit have asked the court to also require the state to make up the 2014-15 shortfall, bringing the total price tag to $163 million.