Give the Kansas Association of School Boards points for creativity.

Last week, the KASB called a news conference to encourage Kansans to take Gov. Sam Brownback up on his recent call for input on the state’s school funding formula. The Legislature is expected to write a new school funding formula during the 2017 session.

The KASB was careful to say it wasn’t proposing a plan itself, but it did outline what the group felt had to be key components of any plan that gets adopted. But by laying out the components, the KASB narrowed the scope of any plan it would support.

Primarily the KASB advocated for three things in any new plan: overall adequacy of school funding; equitable distribution of funding across the state’s 286 school districts; and, the critical one, flexibility for local districts to raise additional money through local taxes to provide programs and services that go beyond the minimum state requirements.

The KASB guidelines are in contrast to a plan laid out last month by a group of former Kansas school administrators and school board members. Their outline did not include “local option budgets,” the mechanism used by districts to implement local property taxes that could be used to provide extra educational programs.

And therein lies the central debate for any new school funding formula: whether it’s fair for wealthier districts to levy taxes to provide educational extras that students in poorer districts don’t have access to.

Prior to 2015, the state formula gave each school district uniform funding based on the total number of students in the district. Additional weight was given for low-income and non-English-speaking students. But districts were allowed to implement local taxes under their local option budgets to pay for enhanced programs and services.

In a 2015 school funding budget crunch, lawmakers repealed the school funding formula and replaced it for two years with a system of block grants that effectively froze every district’s funding in place.

Earlier this year, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the block grant system was inequitable. To comply with the court’s ruling, the Legislature reverted to the old formula and added $38 million in Local Option Budget equalization aid.

While that move satisfied the court in the short term that school funding was equitable, it didn’t answer the larger question of whether state funding was adequate. This week the court will hear arguments on that question. The plaintiffs are seeking an additional $500 million per year. The ruling in the case, expected before the start of the 2017 legislative session, could make lawmakers’ efforts to rewrite the school finance formula a whole lot more difficult.

There are no easy fixes for school funding in Kansas or anywhere. The governor was right to call for public input, but new ideas that haven’t already been debated for years might be too much to hope for.