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Kentucky School Districts Suing Legislature for Funding
Kentucky's General Assembly has failed public school students and its constitutional responsibility by refusing to spend more money on education, a coalition of school districts alleged yesterday.
The Council for Better Education, which forced the historic overhaul of Kentucky's education system with its 1985 lawsuit, returned yesterday to Franklin County Circuit Court to seek relief promised more than a decade ago.
In 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled in the so-called Rose decision that "each child, every child, in this commonwealth must be provided with an equal opportunity to have an adequate education."
Superintendents argue that the General Assembly has not provided schools enough money to comply with the academic goals outlined in the court decision and subsequent 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act.
"We're going back and saying we don't believe the General Assembly has complied," said Blake Haselton, interim president of the Council for Better Education. "The state's current difficult budget situation is no excuse for not adequately funding education."
The suit does not specify how much money is needed to adequately fund Kentucky schools. But the group's consultant put the price tag at $1.2 billion annually.
The legislature's two top leaders -- Senate President David Williams, a Burkesville Republican, and House Speaker Jody Richards, a Bowling Green Democrat -- are defendants in the suit filed in Franklin County. Neither could be reached for comment.
But another ranking legislator, Senate Majority Leader Dan Kelly, said yesterday the suit was a bad idea.
"It's going to be increased expense and distraction trying to litigate this issue in the courts when ultimately this has to be resolved in the General Assembly," Kelly, R-Springfield, said.
Instead, Kelly said, school officials should have come to the Capitol to make their case for more money.
But Haselton said the superintendents had met with leaders in the Senate and House and representatives from both gubernatorial campaigns to no avail.
"There was not a consensus among leadership that there could be any kind of commitment towards funding going into this session of the General Assembly," he said.
Time is of the essence, said those who support the council's decision to file suit yesterday.
"If we do not adequately fund education, we are going to lose all the progress we've made over the last 13 years," said Ed Ford, secretary of the Executive Cabinet. A former lawmaker, Ford spent 17 years on the Senate Education Committee, and chaired the committee as KERA was being crafted and implemented.
"It took us 13 years to get where we are," he said. "It won't take us that long to get back to where we were."
Marion County Schools Superintendent Roger Marcum said schools are improving under the reforms of KERA, but progress will stall because of cuts in funding and lack of additional dollars. In recent years, some districts have said budget woes forced them to cut programs and lay off teachers.
Besides its own study, the group can use as evidence three others released in the past year that concluded state education funding needs a boost of between $400 million and $1.8 billion. This fiscal year, the state has allocated slightly more than $3.1 billion of its $7.1 billion general fund budget to elementary and secondary education.
"Everybody has reached a consensus that we are not providing adequate funding," Marcum said. "The problem we have, and why we had to file the lawsuit is that we couldn't reach consensus about what we're going to do about it. We feel like there's no other course of action."
The council's lawsuit has been assigned to Franklin Circuit Court Judge William L. Graham, who is also considering a funding suit filed earlier this year on behalf of 16 students in eight south-central Kentucky counties by Theodore Lavit of Lebanon.
Lavit, one of the original attorneys on the lawsuit in 1985 that led to education reforms, said he is not opposed to the joining of the two suits.
Several people said yesterday they hope the pending court action will spur state legislators and the governor elected this fall to work quickly to solve the problem, without judicial intervention.
The Rose decision set precedence nationally for other state education equity funding lawsuits, said Bob Sexton, executive director of the Prichard Committee, the state's leading educational advocacy group. But the trend now is toward adequacy lawsuits.
"This is the kind of issue courts are being asked to decide," Sexton said. "It's being pushed by the focus on student achievement. If you're going to expect all children to learn at high levels ... then there is an obligation to provide the means to the ends."
While comparisons will clearly be made between the lawsuits of 1985 and 2003, Sexton cautioned that judicial, economic and political circumstances have changed.
After the Rose decision, "the legislature and governor were involved in trying to figure out how to deal with 100 years of educational problems," Sexton said. "Now we're trying to keep moving forward, keep making progress. All of the circumstances make this a difficult thing to know where it will lead."
When the original suit was filed in 1985, only 66 school districts belonged to the Council for Better Education. The alliance now includes all but 12 of the state's 176 school systems.
More than 50 superintendents joined Haselton yesterday at a news conference to show support for the suit. But not all districts agreed with the decision to go back to court at this time.
"The only reservation we have is the timing," said Tim Heller, superintendent of the McCracken County Schools, which belongs to the council.
Heller and McCracken school board members think the suit should be filed after the governor's election in November.
Some wondered yesterday whether this suit, like its predecessor in 1985, would invite the court to address more than funding questions. Although the initial court case centered on the inequitable distribution of state education dollars, the Supreme Court ordered a whole new system of education.
Wayne Young, executive director of the Kentucky Association of School Administrators recalled the old adage to be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.
"I don't think they'll just write a check and say, 'OK here you go,'" Young said.
But Haselton and others noted that the legislature can revisit KERA during its annual sessions anyway.
"There's some risk in it, but there was some risk when they (filed suit) initially," Marcum said. "And what was created was probably more than anybody thought would happen and it ended up being good for the children of Kentucky."
— Lisa Deffendall
Lawsuit targets school funding
Herald-Leader
2003-09-18
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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