In a move that could affect future K-12 funding, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has asked the Kansas Supreme Court to end its jurisdiction in the Gannon school finance case.
In a motion filed earlier this week, the attorney general’s office said the court should end oversight in the case because all phased-in school funding increases agreed to by the court and Legislature have been implemented.
This issue matters because if the court retains jurisdiction, school district plaintiffs can go directly to the Supreme Court if they believe the Legislature is not abiding by the actions approved by the court. If the court ends its jurisdiction, a legal challenge would have to start as a new case and make its way through appeals to the Supreme Court.
That happened after the Montoy school finance case in the 2000s. The Legislature approved a three-year plan increasing school funding, which the Supreme Court approved and ended the case. When the Legislature began cutting state aid after the Great Recession in 2009, the Gannon lawsuit was filed, and it took numerous hearings and lower court decisions to finally reach the court. The final agreement occurred almost ten years after the Gannon case was originally filed.
In June 2019, the court signed off on a multi-year plan in the Gannon case through the 2022-23 school year to increase funding to 2009 levels plus inflation.
The decision followed years of legal wrangling in which the court said the state had failed to adequately and equitably fund Kansas public schools.
The court retained jurisdiction to ensure the implementation of all the planned funding. Kobach, however, argues that the court’s jurisdiction should end now because the Gannon increases have been completed with the end of the 2022-23 school year.
“The phased-in remedy has been completed,” Kobach said in a statement. “It’s normal to close a case at this time.”
Gov. Laura Kelly’s office told The Associated Press that Kelly opposed Kobach’s request. The spokeswoman described it as an “attempt to allow the Legislature to remove funding from public schools,” the AP reported.
While the Legislature has phased in the Gannon funding, it has refused to fund special education according to state law.
Kansas law requires the state to fund 92 percent of the excess cost of special education. However, legislators currently fund special education at about 69 percent of excess costs, producing a funding gap of about $200 million. School districts have had to transfer general education dollars to provide federal and state-required special education services.
As part of the Gannon settlement, the Legislature must continue to provide inflation-adjusted increases to base state aid to schools in the future. But last session, the chairs of the Senate Education Committee and House K-12 Education Budget Committee sought to change the way base aid was calculated in a way that could have cost school districts $215 million, according to the Kansas State Department of Education. That proposal was later abandoned
KASB will monitor and report on developments in the case.
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