Topeka ? State tax collections in the month of March came in $39.5 million higher than expected, the Kansas Department of Revenue said Monday.

That means that for the first three quarters of the fiscal year so far, tax receipts have exceeded the latest estimates by nearly $315 million, the report indicated.

That March revenue report came out just a few hours before the Kansas House was scheduled to begin debating a school finance bill that would add an estimated $533 million in new K-12 education funding, phased in over five years, a figure many Democrats believe is too low to satisfy a Kansas Supreme Court order to provide adequate funding for public schools.

But Republican leaders in the House were quick to caution against making too much of the report too soon.

“With the numbers we’re looking at, we can make it through the 2018-2019 time frame, but it gets more challenging as you get to that 2021-2022 time frame,” said Rep. Steven Johnson, R-Assaria, who chairs the House Taxation Committee, during an interview after the numbers came out.

Johnson and other Republicans have been cautioning for months that much of the unexpectedly high receipts in recent months could be the result of federal tax law changes. They argue that officials won’t really know how much of an impact that is having until the end of April, after people file their 2017 tax returns.

But House Minority Leader Jim Ward, D-Wichita, a candidate for governor, said he believes it’s the result of a tax bill state lawmakers passed in 2017, reversing course on many of the tax cuts that then-Gov. Sam Brownback had championed five years earlier.

“I think this shows that the income tax reform we did last year was the right thing to do and it stabilized our budget,” Ward said in a separate interview Monday. “I think it gives us options on a whole range of ideas.”

For March, individual income tax collections came in nearly $57 million higher than expected. But retail sales tax collections were more than $10 million below official estimates, and a number of other revenue sources were below expectations as well.

Although the Legislature is under a state Supreme Court order to address school funding, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say they have additional priorities to restore funding for programs and services that took cuts during the years when the state was suffering from continuing revenue shortfalls.

“Even to fund this (school finance) plan, you’re not putting more money into transportation. You’re not addressing the KPERS situation. There are still a lot of needs,” said Rep. Fred Patton, R-Topeka, who chairs the House K-12 Education Budget Committee. “So this makes it a little easier to vote for that funding bill, but still you have those concerns moving forward.”