The stakes just got enormously higher for Kansas lawmakers. So did the opportunity.

Now that the Kansas Supreme Court has declared Kansas school funding inadequate and given the Legislature until June 30 to come up with a new plan, legislators have their work cut out for them. Half of the session is complete. When lawmakers return to work Monday from a weeklong break, they still must tackle all of the big-ticket items on their 2017 agenda: spending, taxes and a school finance plan. The state’s looming budget deficits haven’t gone away. The court’s ruling on school finance only threatens to deepen the hole.

The question is will lawmakers be able to compromise and coalesce behind strategies that tighten spending where possible, generate new tax revenues and reform school funding appropriately? And if they do, will Gov. Sam Brownback go along or will he dig his ideological heels in ever deeper, pushing the state to the brink of school closings and fiscal crisis?

In declaring that funding for public schools is unconstitutionally low, the Supreme Court did not specify how much more funding was needed to make school financing adequate. Instead, the court noted that tens of thousands of the state’s students were below grade level in at least one subject area and that the achievement gaps for blacks and Hispanics, compared with white students, were significant. The court ruled that the current finance system did not adequately meet the requirements of Article 6 of the Kansas Constitution, which requires the Legislature to “make suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state.”

The Kansas State Department of Education has said it needs at least $841 million in additional funding over the next two years to meet the court’s adequacy requirement.

If that number is accurate, legislators will have to find $1 billion or more in the next 18 months to adequately fund education and balance the state’s budget. That can’t be done with spending cuts. And it shouldn’t be done, as Brownback has suggested, by using one-time gimmicks such as selling the state’s future tobacco settlement assets, not making pension payments and sweeping money out of the state highway funds. Simply put, the Legislature can’t balance the budget and fund school finance without tax reform.

Alan Rupe, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the school finance case, is optimistic.

“The new, more moderate Legislature has already suggested that it will repeal some of the tax cuts put into place by Governor Brownback,” Rupe said after the ruling. “This would go a long way in not only allowing Kansas to address the inadequacies in education funding, but also in addressing the overwhelming budget deficit that Kansas is currently facing.”

Let’s hope Rupe is right. Time is not on lawmakers’ side and neither apparently is the governor. But legislators in this session have demonstrated a willingness to work together like no other in recent memory, and they have a historic opportunity in front of them to do what’s right for Kansas by reforming the state’s tax policies and increasing spending on education.