School financing suit back in court
BOISE, Idaho – A month after lawmakers passed a bill aimed at improving the way Idaho pays for school construction, plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit are back in court, saying the state isn’t doing enough.
“The Legislature didn’t do what the Supreme Court said they should do,” said Stan Kress, superintendent of the Cottonwood School District and a lead plaintiff in a case that has been churning through Idaho’s legal system for more than a decade. “I don’t think they put enough money into it; there’s lots of things they didn’t do.”
Until lawmakers passed the school construction bill last month, Idaho provided no direct support for public school construction, though the state Education Department subsidized some bond interest. Then, as now, district bond votes required a two-thirds majority vote to approve construction bonds.
Kress’ group of school districts, Idaho Schools for Equal Educational Opportunity, sued the state in 1990 over poor conditions in several school buildings. They said the state should provide a better match to all voter-approved school bonds, and provide more money for school building maintenance.
The complex case dragged on for years. In 2001, 4th District Judge Deborah Bail ruled the system for funding schoolhouses was unconstitutional, because it left the poorest districts unable to afford safe schools.
Bail also rejected a 2002 Idaho law, passed to try to address the 2001 decision, forcing courts to order no-vote local property tax increases if districts didn’t fix schools that were falling into disrepair.
The Idaho attorney general’s office then asked the state high court to reject Bail’s decision, but in December the court sided with Kress’ group and ordered lawmakers to come up with a new way of paying for buildings and repairs.
In the just-concluded session, lawmakers passed a bill that sets aside about $5 million for school maintenance next year. It requires districts to deposit an amount equal to at least 2 percent of their school buildings’ value into a maintenance account, and establishes a $25 million state loan fund that school districts can tap to fix safety problems.
To get a loan, districts would have to let the state Board of Education appoint a supervisor who could fire the district superintendent and order a property tax increase to pay back the money, if district voters reject such increases twice.
Kress said that among other things, lawmakers didn’t completely address the Supreme Court ruling because they didn’t change the requirement that bonds pass by a supermajority. He also objected to the provision that allows the state to fire a superintendent and take over the district.
“They were supposed to take care of the facilities issue, and instead they passed a bill to try to punish people, for the most part.”
Others had voiced the same objections as lawmakers debated the issue. Before the Senate voted on the measure, Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, had predicted to his colleagues that the law wouldn’t meet the court’s requirements.
But Sen. Curt McKenzie, R-Nampa and one of the bill’s sponsors, said Friday that he thought the bill followed the order of the court.
“I don’t know what they were looking for,” he said of Kress’ group.
When the Supreme Court ruled in December, it retained jurisdiction of the case, according to court papers. Thursday’s filing asks that the high court send the case to the lower court judge, Deborah Bail, “and for Judge Bail to rule on how much more the Legislature needs to do,” Kress said.