School lawsuit answer revived

BOISE – As a major school-funding lawsuit heads to the Idaho Supreme Court this summer, some are looking back to a proposed settlement that has sat untouched since state lawmakers refused to consider it in 2003.

Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican, and state Superintendent of Schools Marilyn Howard, a Democrat, jointly appointed a task force to come up with solutions to a legal fight between school districts and the state that had been in the courts for more than a decade. The panel offered a settlement package to lawmakers in a report in February 2003.

“These were people who really knew the issue and had a deep interest in finding a solution,” Howard said last week. “The whole thing’s only five pages. They just pointed right to the issue and said, ‘Here.’ “

Kempthorne’s press secretary, Mike Journee, said the governor believes “there might still be some viable answers there,” but is concerned that some of the recommendations may be too costly.

Jerry Evans, a former longtime GOP state superintendent of schools and a member of the task force, said, “The report came out with a pretty reasonable solution to the whole situation, and I think it is as valid today as it was then.”

The group of school districts that sued the state over inadequate funding for school construction agreed to drop its lawsuit if the task force’s four recommendations were enacted by the Legislature. But lawmakers refused to consider the settlement, instead passing a law designed to turn the tables in the lawsuit by casting the districts as defendants and imposing court-ordered, no-vote property tax increases if districts didn’t fix their own schools without state help. That law was voided as unconstitutional by state District Judge Deborah Bail, and Bail’s decision was upheld by the Idaho Supreme Court.

Now, the long-running legal case is back where it stood before: Bail ruled the state’s system for funding school construction unconstitutional in 2001, and the state is appealing her decision to the Idaho Supreme Court. Bail ruled that Idaho’s system leaves poor school districts unable to afford to provide safe schoolhouses, and she ordered the Legislature to fix the system. The state Constitution makes the Legislature responsible for providing for schools.

“The problem, we all know, is still there,” said Mike Friend, executive director of the Idaho Association of School Administrators and a task force member. The task force’s recommendations, he said, “have not lost their value, and certainly in my opinion ought to be brought back out for consideration as a viable solution.”

The task force’s four recommendations:

• That the Legislature pass a constitutional amendment to lower the required “supermajority” to pass a school construction bond issue from two-thirds of the vote to 60 percent, if the election takes place on one of the state’s four main election dates. Kempthorne has long promoted this move, which would require a two-thirds vote in each house of the Legislature and a majority vote of the people to take effect.

• Passing an “emergency safety levy” law allowing school districts to impose an emergency tax levy without voter approval when they have an identified serious building safety hazard, no money to fix it, voters have rejected a levy to do so, and a court has agreed that all those conditions have been met.

• Expanding an existing, three-year-old law requiring the state to provide partial matching funds for school districts’ interest expenses when they pass construction bonds. Districts would get more money under the recommendation, and the money couldn’t simply be shifted from their other, existing state funding – as lawmakers have been doing thus far.

• Requiring school districts to create a maintenance fund equal to 1.5 percent of the replacement value of their school buildings. The state would kick in a third of the money each year. Part of the state contribution would vary based on the state’s school-funding formula, while the rest would simply match districts’ contributions. Districts would have two years to start phasing in the new maintenance fund, and then build it up over five years. The state’s share couldn’t be shifted out of the existing school budget.

Howard said the task force’s recommendations addressed the differences between Idaho school districts in their ability to pass bonds – the interest subsidies come on a sliding scale based on the district’s wealth and other factors – and dealt with the long-neglected issue of maintaining schoolhouses so they never become unsafe in the first place.

Plus, she said, they set up a way to deal with an unsafe schoolhouse so kids can be protected, “and how can that happen in a way that the district can actually fix the problem, not just be punished but actually have some wherewithal to fix it.”

Howard said when state lawmakers passed legislation in 2002 to subsidize local districts’ bond interest, and then failed to provide new money for that, instead dipping into state lottery funds districts already received, they defeated the purpose of the program. “It’s funding it by removing maintenance money from schools,” she said. “So it feels like we’re taking out of one pocket and putting it in the other. That’s not particularly helpful, when schools are asked to maintain their facilities so that buildings can last longer.”

Evans said the state long has provided funding to school districts for educational programs, through a formula that varies by districts’ needs. “They need something similar with regard to the school districts’ obligations for adequate and reasonable facilities,” he said. “And that task force report did that.”

Idaho long has left the cost of school construction to local property taxpayers, who must vote by a two-thirds majority to raise their own taxes in order to pass a bond. There’s been little state aid.

Evans said he thinks the school districts ultimately will prevail in their lawsuit. The case has gone to the Idaho Supreme Court three times before; each time, the court has sided with the districts.

“The state sits there and says, ‘We don’t have any responsibility for school buildings.’ Well, they have a responsibility for the whole system of free, common schools, and the Constitution’s fairly clear about that,” Evans said. “There’s no way you can say that school facilities are not a part of that responsibility.”

Final briefs are still being filed with the Idaho Supreme Court in the school lawsuit, and the justices could schedule oral arguments for as soon as midsummer.

Howard said she’s hopeful that the task force’s recommendations still will play a role in fixing Idaho’s school-funding system. “Even though they might not have been accepted at the time, very often, when the decision gets made, that kind of groundwork will be helpful,” she said. “They kept it very simple.”

Other task force members who helped craft the report were former state Sen. Darrell Deide, who at the time was education adviser to the governor; Randy Nelson, president of Associated Taxpayers of Idaho; Milford Terrell, owner of DeBest Plumbing and a member of the state Board of Education; and three Idaho school district superintendents: Stan Kress of Cottonwood, Nick Hallett of Minidoka, and Geoffrey Thomas of Madison.