Sweeping school finance trial to start in Texas

October 22, 2012

By onlinews in Business, News No Comments

DALLAS Oct 22 (Reuters) ? Lawyers for hundreds of Texas
school districts besieged by rapid population growth and deep
budget cuts argue in a massive school finance trial opening
Monday that the state has failed to fund public education
adequately and resolve inequities among districts.

Lawsuits filed by six groups have been merged into a single
trial in an Austin courtroom that could last for several months.
The legal action was brought on behalf of about 650 of the
state?s 1,000-plus school districts, accounting for some 3.7
million of Texas? 5 million school children.

?The school districts feel they simply don?t have the
resources to do what the state has asked them to do,? said David
Thompson, a Houston lawyer representing the largest group of
districts suing the state.

Texas is hardly the only state facing critical funding
shortages and disparities. Active school finance lawsuits are
pending in 15 states, including Colorado, New York, New Jersey
and Kansas, according to the National Education Access Network,
which tracks such court action across the country.

In Texas, the lawsuits came after the Republican-controlled
Legislature acted in 2011 to trim $5.4 billion in education
funding to help balance the state?s two-year budget, opting to
make such cuts rather than dip into surplus ?rainy-day? funds.

The result was widespread teacher lay-offs and larger class
sizes at a time when schools were struggling to meet higher
state and federal standards even as federal stimulus dollars
were running out and school enrollment was soaring, attorneys
for the districts said.

Republican Governor Rick Perry has said it is important to
preserve the rainy-day fund for emergencies such as natural
disasters.

The lawsuits seek sufficient and equitable funding for all
Texas school districts.

Four of the six groups suing the state represent school
districts. The others are advocates for charter schools and a
group of business people pushing for more efficient schools.

The plaintiffs also argue that school districts are subject
to a nearly uniform tax that prohibits them from making
discretionary tax decisions about school funding. They contend
that forcing districts to tax near the cap, or ceiling, to
collect enough revenue for schools in effect creates a statewide
tax rate, which is barred under the Texas Constitution.

?Texas is in a unique situation,? said Michael Griffith, an
analyst for the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit
research organization. ?With a constitutional prohibition on a
statewide property tax and no state income tax, there is no
place to get new money.?

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund,
representing a group of districts in the lawsuit, says funding
gaps between districts are at the highest levels in two decades.

For instance, one Rio Grande Valley school district taxes at
the state maximum of $1.17 per $100 of assessed property value
and raises $5,513 per child, while a nearby district taxes at 11
cents and yields $10,737, according to MALDEF.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said in a court filing
that ?the Constitution does not require complete funding equity
among the districts? and that the ?finance system is
significantly more equitable? than in the past.

Abbott wrote that the districts suing the state ?must show
they are unable to provide a general diffusion of knowledge
because of the entire system?s unsuitability.?

Most of Texas? seven previous school finance cases were
rooted in claims of vast inequities in education revenues and
spending on schools between wealthy and poor school districts.

?Texas funds schools mainly through local property taxes,
and that creates a system that is inherently inequitable,? said
Michael Rebell, director of the National Education Access
Network and a law and education professor at Columbia
University.

By contrast, most other states rely on a combination of
property and income taxes to fund public education.

Largely as a result of the earlier litigation, the state
nearly two decades ago established a redistribution-of-wealth
system known as ?Robin Hood? to funnel property tax revenues
from wealthy districts to poorer ones. That system proved
imperfect as one district after another hit the state?s ceiling
on property tax rates, limiting the revenue individual districts
could raise.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the school
finance system in effect created an unconstitutional statewide
property tax, and the Legislature responded the next year by
redirecting more state dollars to schools, lowering property
taxes and freezing per-pupil spending.

In 2011, ?instead of coming up with a permanent solution,
the Legislature did something that hadn?t been done since World
War II: It cut funding for education,? Thompson said.

Source

Source: http://www.onlinews.net/sweeping-school-finance-trial-to-start-in-texas/

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