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Kansas schools join lawsuit to demand adequate funding
From the smallest school districts in Kansas to districts as big as Wichita, schools throughout Kansas are coming together to demand adequate funding from state legislatures. This group of schools, known as Schools for Fair Funding, is filing a law suit against the state of Kansas in order to receive the funding they need.
“Even some of their (the legislatures) own studies indicated that funding was not at an adequate level and yet they’ve chosen to ignore that,” superintendent John Morton said. “They’ve chosen to cut education funding a number of times since we’ve gotten into this financial issue, so I would hope that we would come out of this in a stronger position where more funding for our students would be available to school districts.”
Schools for Fair Funding started as a small group of mid-sized Kansas school districts with high numbers of special needs students receiving less money per pupil when they needed more.
“Now the funding issue is so critical for all school districts that we’re seeing all kinds of school districts wanting to be a part of this because the funding is not adequate for any school district in the state,” Morton said.
Schools for Fair Funding filed its first law suit against the state of Kansas in 1999, and it was not resolved until 2005. Morton said this time the law suit might go through faster, but it will probably be at least three to five years.
“It was settled in 2005 with the idea that the legislation would come up with a three year funding plan, which they did, and then they chose not to fund the third year and then began to make the reductions,” Morton said. “We were hoping to get the Supreme Court to revisit that, but that didn’t happen.”
Before a law suit can be filed, both the House and the Senate must be notified. After 120 days have passed, the law suit can be filed.
“It provides a time for them to do something so that maybe we wouldn’t have that need,” Morton said. “It’s a very long and time consuming process when you file it from scratch.”
Newton schools have lost $2.3 million in funding resulting in the elimination of the high school instructional coach, the removal of vacant positions and increased class sizes, specifically in elementary schools.
“(The legislature has) no plan for getting us out of this situation besides cuts,” school board president Carol Sue Stayrook Hobbs said.
Both Morton and Hobbs said they believe the money the legislature is providing for school districts is not adequate to meet the needs of schools.
“What we’re finding is with more students with a greater variety of learning needs and behavior needs we need to put more resources available to us,” Morton said.
The resources Morton spoke of are currently unavailable to the school, but with the help of this law suit, the school would be able to do a better job of meeting each student’s education needs.
“Ultimately we would hope to be part of an effort to get the legislature to fund education equitably and adequately in the state,” Morton said. “That’s been our premise all along.”
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