Judge Orders Kansas' Public Schools Closed (Activist Judge Alert)

AP ^ | 05/11/04 | AP

[ILBBACH]

Judge Orders Kansas' Public Schools Closed

POSTED: 11:08 am CDT May 11, 2004 UPDATED: 12:48 pm CDT May 11, 2004

TOPEKA, Kan. -- The state must close its public schools this fall while it fixes constitutional flaws in its system for distributing aid to those schools, a district judge ruled Tuesday in a case that is already under appeal to the Kansas Supreme Court.

The order issued by Shawnee County District Judge Terry Bullock anticipates he will soon issue a follow up restraining order preventing the spending of any money after June 30. That means the Tuesday's order will not affect the current academic year.

Dan Biles, an attorney for the State Board of Education, said an appeal of Tuesday's order will be filed quickly, and could stay Bullock's order past the start of the new school year.

"This action by the court will terminate all spending functions under the unconstitutional funding provisions, effectively putting our school system on 'pause' until the unconstitutional funding defects are remedied by the legislative and executive branches of our government," Bullock wrote in Tuesday's order.

He continued: "Although this action may delay our children's education slightly (should the other branches fail to respond quickly), it will end the inadequate and inequitable education being provided now and the disparate damage presently being done to the most vulnerable of our children."

The order was quickly dismissed by Republican legislative leaders, who had already said they planned to pay it little heed, given that the case is already on appeal to the Supreme Court.

"It's ridiculous," said House Speaker Doug Mays, R-Topeka.

Whitney Watson, a spokesman for Attorney General Phill Kline, who filed the appeal to the state's highest court, said the office is reviewing the ruling and planned to announce a response at 2 p.m.

Bullock's decision came just three days after legislators adjourned the 2004 session without acting on his December order to fix state's school finance system, which he found to be unconstitutional.

Bullock issued that preliminary ruling in a 1999 lawsuit brought by parents and administrators in the Dodge City and Salina school districts. He concluded that state's system for distributing $2.77 billion in aid is unconstitutional partly because of how it distributes money to programs for poor and minority students.

He also found the existing level of funding to be constitutionally inadequate.

Bullock gave legislators the 2004 session to fix the system, setting a deadline of July 1 to make his order final. Legislators responded by passing a law allowing the state to immediately appeal the preliminary order to the Kansas Supreme Court.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said it was "truly unfortunate" that children, parents and teachers must pay the price of legislative inaction.

Alan Rupe, an attorney representing the Salina and Dodge City districts, said Bullock's order is "certainly called for by basis of the Legislature's behavior."

He said legislators were "defiant" in ignoring Bullock's earlier ruling and failing to find a school finance solution, and that Tuesday's ruling suggests appropriate consequences.

"You can't argue with the logic that if the school finance statutes are unconstitutional, you don't enforce them," Rupe said.

In his Tuesday ruling, Bullock said there were "literally hundreds" of ways legislators could structure, manage and fund public schools. He said that legislators could determine inefficiencies in the present structure and that those corrections might reduce the total dollars needed to fund education.

Those corrections, he wrote, could include consolidation of school districts and the outsourcing or regionalization of services.

During the trial, attorneys for the Salina and Dodge City school districts presented a 2002 consultants' study suggesting that schools were underfunded in Kansas by more than $800 million.

"At this point, nothing Judge Bullock did would come as a surprise," said John Koepke, executive director of the Kansas Association of School Boards. "Judge Bullock made clear in his preliminary order his frustration that the legislature has let things deteriorative to the point they are now. It's difficult to understand how closing schools would help children."

Parents of children from Wichita to Olathe starting calling schools almost as soon as Bullock's order was released, looking for more information.

"It has the potential to be the most disruptive circumstance I've encountered in public education in the last 40 years," said Olathe schools Superintendent Ron Wimmer. "I've never experienced a circumstance where a judge has ordered a complete shutdown of the schools."

[First_Salute]

Bump.

[First_Salute]

Bump.

[GOPcapitalist]

Impeach the judge.

[breakem]

He also found the existing level of funding to be constitutionally inadequate.

Perhaps the scariest court quote in a very long time.

[Lurking in Kansas]

Impeach the judge.

DITTO!

Idiot judge...bump

[dufekin]

I'm not entirely familiar with Kansas constitutional law, but if it's anything close to that of most states and countries, the judge has usurped the legislature's appropriation authority. As such, he should be ruled unconstitutional and generally ignored. The job of a legislature is not to ratify the decrees of judges. A legislature, by definition, legislates. Understand, you Honor?

[TheSpottedOwl]

I can just hear all the cheering kids. Sort of like when you wake up and it's snowing ;-)

[rwfromkansas]

This judge has a history of judicial overreaching.

Kick him out!

[aardvark1]

This happened in VT a few years ago. We had a town vote to "secede" from the state this year and join NH. The legislature here created a worse mess than before.

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

There is some vague wording in the KS Constitution about providing a "suitable" education to every child. The liberals have been working to exploit that for several years now.

Who needs legislatures? Conservatives should get with the program and start their own legal organizations that are out to sue for what they want. Working for legislative victory is so pre-1960s.

[Aquinasfan]

The judge is doing a good thing, which he thinks is a bad thing, for the wrong reason.

This action represents a quantum leap in judicial activism, comparable to the MA SJC's ruling in favor of homosexual "marriage."

[bereanway]

I believe this judge (Bullock) and the Legislature may have crossed horns before. I thought Bullock also stated the state had to come up with another $1,000,000,000 in school funding and the Legislature has basically told him to go p$ss up a rope. Sebelius' comments on this don't surprise me at all, typical dim.

The judge has got to go, now.

[GreenLanternCorps]

I wonder, can the Kansas Legislature strip the court of it's authority to hear this case?

[E Rocc]

We had a similar problem in Ohio, though no one ever went so far as to order the schools closed. Ironically, part of the problem here was local funding: some districts have industry or higher property values and easily support themselves.

One of the little towns downstate filed a suit, and some little podunk judge decided to make a name for himself beyond chicken-rustling cases by ruling the system "unconstitutional". Inexplicably, the state Supreme Court refused to overrule him, putting this guy whose probably never gotten more than 300 votes in his life in de facto charge of the funding mechanism.

Apparently it never occurred to the state legislature to simply amend the state Constitution to make the long time existing sytem "constitutional".

-Eric

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Kansas Trial Court Declares Funding System Unconstitutional Court Relies on Costing-Out Study and Says "Money Matters" On December 2, 2003, in Montoy v. State, the District Court of Shawnee County, Kansas, after a bench trial earlier this year and oral argument in November, declared the state education finance system unconstitutional. The Kansas legislature enacted the current funding scheme, the School District Financing and Quality Performance Act of 1992 (SDFQPA), in 1992, in response to the Mock v. State fiscal equity litigation, and the Kansas Supreme Court declared the legislation constitutional in Unified School District No. 229 v. State in 1994. Backsliding and Inequities Since 1994, however, the legislature has removed and amended key provisions of the 1992 law and added new provisions, the combination of which has led to funding disparities that now exceed 300%. Applying a "rational basis test" to the funding system, the court found the present scheme to be irrational and in violation of Article 6, the Education Article, of the state constitution due to "its failure to provide equity in funding for all Kansas children." The Montoy plaintiffs also claimed that the funding system has an adverse disparate impact on students who are minorities or English language learners and those with disabilities. The court heard convincing testimony that most of these students attend school in the small number of urban school districts in Kansas and that those districts receive the least per-pupil funding, despite the fact that these students are more expensive to educate. Therefore, the court held that the funding system, as to these students, violates both Article 6 and the Kansas Constitution's equal protection clause. Costing-Out Study and Inadequacy In addition to alleging funding inequities, the Montoy plaintiffs also claimed that funding was inadequate to provide the "suitable education" guaranteed by the state constitution. The court heard testimony on a costing-out study conducted in 2001-2002 for the Legislative Coordinating Council. The study calculated the cost of providing a "suitable education" using both the professional judgment and successful schools methodologies. For the study the state defined "suitable education" using required course offerings and other programs and services as "input" measures and percentages of students scoring satisfactory on reading and math assessments as "output" measures. The study concluded that "the funds provided to Kansas schools were $853 million short of adequate for a suitable education," as defined by the Legislature - over $1 billion, according to the court, when adjusted for inflation and for items excluded from the study, such as transportation and facilities. Of Course Money Matters The defendants argued that money doesn't matter in education, that "there is no correlation between spending and student learning." Dr. Eric Hanushek testified for the defendants, but, as summarized by the court, "testified that money spent wisely, logically, and with accountability would be very useful indeed. He concluded by agreeing with this statement: 'Only a fool would say money doesn't matter.'" (See the Hoke County v. State decision, from North Carolina, for this underlying quote regarding Dr. Hanushek's testimony in that case.) Furthermore, the court heard testimony from Kansas educators who "almost with one voice, laid out the strategies necessary to teach the most challenging students." Their recommended strategies included: Smaller class sizes New learning strategies and professional development for teachers More and better trained teachers Principals who encourage innovation and reward achievement Expanded learning times, and Preschool. The court also cited compelling evidence from the Dodge City school district, which received extra funding in the form of grants and used the money for some of these strategies to generate major achievement gains. The court declared: "'Money doesn't matter?' That dog won't hunt in Dodge City!" NCLB Defendants further asserted that any school meeting the "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law was providing a suitable education. Regarding this argument, the court referred to the fact that failure rates as high as 70.9% (in high school math) are adequate to meet the AYP requirement in Kansas at this time and said, "obviously, the attainment of such AYP status in no way indicates" a suitable education. Moreover, the court pointed out that the substantial achievement gaps for some groups of Kansas students, "if not corrected, will soon violate . . . No Child Left Behind." July 1, 2004 Deadline The court issued an interim order and set a deadline of July 1, 2004, to allow a full legislative session for "our Legislature and our state's chief executive [to] step up to the challenge to bring the Kansas school funding scheme into compliance" with the state constitution. The court provided remedial guidelines, which include making the funding system more equitable, more adequate (at a cost estimated to be over $1 billion more than the nearly $4 billion currently spent on Kansas's 467,000 K-12 students), and providing more resources for the school districts educating the state's most vulnerable students. The court retained jurisdiction and plans to reconvene in July to review the actions taken to remedy the current constitutional violations. Trends The Montoy trial court's decision is consistent with trends in school funding litigations and remedial orders across the country. For many years, courts in most of these cases have concluded unequivocally that money matters in education, rejecting state defendants' assertions to the contrary. More recently, courts have also been relying on their state's own student learning standards to measure the quality of education available to and received by schoolchildren (e.g. Hoke County v. North Carolina; CFE v. New York; Lake View v. Arkansas; Hancock v. Driscoll (Massachusetts)), and they are more frequently ordering cost-based funding reforms. Another trend that is causing controversy in states with declining rural populations, like Kansas, are proposals for state-imposed school and school district consolidations. Although the Montoy decision does not mention consolidation, rural communities in Kansas will become concerned if the state, in its efforts to remedy the constitutional violation, considers consolidating small rural schools. Visit the Rural Trust website for information on consolidation proposals and the advantages of small schools. Prepared by Molly A. Hunter, December 2, 2003 © Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. 2003

ACCESS c/o Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc. 6 E. 43rd St, New York, NY, 10017 | (212) 867-8455 Fax: (212)/ 867-8460

 

[bereanway]

I believe you're right about the suitable education or some similar language. I had heard earlier that is what this judge is attempting to stand on. Everything the judge found was based upon the 2002 study. I don't believe the legislature submitted any evidence in the case.

No doubt the 2002 study was funded and conducted by educrats but I'm not certain if it was the Dodge City and Salina school districts who commissioned the study or not.

[AZLiberty]

To be consistent, he should also take away their authority to levy taxes. Then the money would remain in the hands of the parents, who could take their business elsewhere. Damn the public schools -- full speed ahead!

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

This looks to be one more nationwide liberal litigation networked aimed at winning through the courts that which they have been unable to get through normal democratic, political processes:

Coming to a state near you -- Court mandated educational funding increases

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

The Kansas Study