Opinion ID: 3051186
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Conditions in Other Districts

Text: NUSD’s reported incremental costs for ELL programming, and its need to divert other funds to cover them, are generally consistent with the experiences of districts across Arizona. 27 We note that, for a variety of contractual and statutory reasons, and to ensure a fiscal cushion, NUSD carries over some portion of its budget every year, including some funds that it might otherwise spend on ELL programming or other needs. That practice, rooted in careful fiscal planning, does not indicate a surplus of funds for educational needs. 1838 FLORES v. HORNE District officials testifying at the hearing reported incremental costs ranging from $1,077 per student to $4,072 per student. All of these districts are funding their programs by diverting funds from other sources, often by using additional taxes that they are allowed to levy for use in desegregation programs.28 Group B weights, alone, are not generally sufficient to fund ELL programs. Testimony from officials in other districts confirms that reclassification regularly takes longer than two years for many students. The average reclassification time in the Tucson Unified School District, for instance, is 4.6 years. In the Murphy Elementary School District, nearly two-thirds of ELL students took more than four years to be reclassified. Similarly, in the Scottsdale Unified School District, the majority of ELL students take more than two years to be reclassified, and in the Glendale Union High School District, 46% of ELL students at one school and 15% of ELL students at another had been in ELL programs for more than two years. No district submitted evidence showing that all of its ELL students had been reclassified within two years. G. The Ruling on Remand After the evidentiary hearing at which the facts concerning the current status of ELL students and ELL funding were presented, the district court again denied relief from judgment. Flores v. Arizona, 480 F. Supp. 2d 1157, 1167 (“Flores XI”) (D. Ariz. 2007). 28 A broader survey of school district officials conducted for Flores by Dr. Chuck Essigs of the Arizona Association of School Business Officials yielded similar results. Dr. Essigs did not independently verify his survey results or ensure that responding districts used a common cost reporting system. As these results vary widely (from $351 to $3,874), neither we nor the district court rely much upon them. It is worth noting, nonetheless, that, for the fourteen surveyed districts with over 1,000 ELL students, incremental costs in 2006-07 in all but one were above $1,000, with most of the districts’ incremental costs in the range between $1,000 and $2,000. FLORES v. HORNE 1839 The court held that the improvements at NUSD do not establish that Arizona is fulfilling its duty to fund ELL programming rationally. Id. at 1160, 1166. Most of these improvements, the court found, are due to NUSD’s own management improvements, not to reliable or sufficient funding. Id. at 1160. And the improvements are limited: NUSD’s ELL high school students, in particular, are still falling well behind its non-ELL students, and even the successes will be “fleeting at best” unless Arizona meets its funding obligations. Id. Thus, although NUSD is “doing substantially better,” id., and the state has developed a significantly improved infrastructure for ELL programming, “mere amelioration of those specific conditions” cited as examples of the funding shortage in the Declaratory Judgment, is “inadequate” to justify relief: “Rather, compliance would require a funding system that rationally relates funding available to the actual costs of all elements of ELL instruction.” Id. at 1165. The district court went on to determine that the Superintendent and the Legislative Intervenors had not demonstrated that such a system was in place. The court decided that HB 2064 does not sufficiently address the inadequacies of Arizona’s ELL funding system and, in fact, introduces new problems. In so holding, the district court reasoned as follows: HB 2064’s increase in Group B weights is inadequate, as “the per-student incremental cost of providing ELL instruction is greater than either the current Group B weight of $365 [set by HB 2010] or the increased weight of $444 that would be provided if [the c]ourt approved HB 2064, both in NUSD and in other districts.” Id. at 1162. HB 2064’s two-year cut-off of that funding would suddenly, and irrationally, further underfund school districts. Id. at 1166. The HB 2064 grant programs, which might have linked funding rationally to costs, are no better. The Arizona structured English immersion fund suffers from the same irrational two-year cut-off, id. at 1163, and both it and the compensatory instruction fund violate provisions of federal law that bar taking federal funds into account in mak1840 FLORES v. HORNE ing state funding decisions and bar supplanting existing state funding with federal monies. Id. at 1166. The district court concluded that, without a rational funding system for ELL incremental costs, Arizona remains out of compliance with the EEOA, despite some successes in NUSD: On January 24, 2000, this Court held that the State’s minimum funding level for ELL programs was arbi- trary and capricious and bore no rational relation to the actual funding needed to insure that ELL stu- dents could achieve mastery of the State’s academic standards. . . . More than 7 years later, circumstances in this regard remain the same. The Moving Parties have not shown compliance with this Court’s decree, much less changed circumstances that would warrant modification or dissolution of this Court’s order. Id. at 1167. The district court gave Arizona until the end of the then-current legislative session to comply. Id. The Legislative Intervenors and the Superintendent timely appealed.29 29 After Arizona failed to comply with the district court’s order in Flores XI, the court again found the state to be in contempt on October 10, 2007. See Flores v. Arizona, No. CV-92-596 (“Flores XII”)(D. Ariz. 2007). The present compliance deadline is March 4, 2008. Id. at 4. The contempt order has been separately appealed and is not before us. We do, however, discuss it below in Part II(C)(2) for the light it sheds on the adequacy of HB 2064. FLORES v. HORNE 1841 Volume 2 of 2 FLORES v. HORNE 1843