Opinion ID: 1789805
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 12

Heading: Changing the Subject

Text: Because equity could not be achieved in school funding, perhaps it was best to change the subject when revising the formula. In the years since the 1993 school funding revision, the question of adequacy has become increasingly the focus of school finance litigation around the country. [35] In Missouri, the 2005 school funding legislation accordingly changed the subject from the 1993 concern about disparities and access to resources to adequacy of resources. This change of subject is supported in part by the observation that school districts with a great deal of money often do not produce the best results. The new law recognizes that a certain level of funding is needed for the district to provide an adequate education. [36] The formula arrives at an adequacy amountinitially $6,117 per pupilby ascertaining a number of districts that are performing well and averaging their per-pupil spending. [37] What a school district has available to spend beyond the adequate threshold, of course, is influenced largely by its property tax wealth. So the question of disparity is supposedly of less concern because the new formula will assure that all students have what the legislature has determined is adequate. There is a catch, however, because the $6,117 legislatively determined to be adequate only counts a district's operating costs, which by law include no spending for debt service or other capital needs. When it comes to spending adequacy-based local and state revenues, however, districts may spend up to 12 percent of these revenues for debt service and capital purposes. [38] This means that districts that depend on the state funding formula (that is, they are not held harmless because of their per-pupil property wealth) always will be spending less for operating costs than the adequacy-based formula provides. The formula, therefore, always will be funded inadequately for operating costs when districts use some of their adequacy-based revenues for debt service and capital purposes. That is true for most of the state's 500-plus school districts. Property-rich districts, by contrast, will not have to devote limited operating revenues to debt service and capital purposes as do property-poor districts, so their adequacy amounts will be greater than other districts' adequacy amounts. Perhaps this inequityand inadequacy of adequacy was unintended, or perhaps the legislature deemed a difference of up to 12 percent to be close enough for government work. [39] The constitutional language is in some parts poetic and in some parts specific. As to the poetic, the school districts and other plaintiffs suing the state have a difficult chore in making a constitutional funding standard out of article IX, section 1(a) of the Missouri Constitution language: A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people.... [40] On this point I agree with the principal opinion. As to the specific, the constitution mandates that the state allocate no less than 25 percent of its revenue to school funding. MO. CONST. art. IX, sec. 3(b). While it might have been helpful if the constitution were to give a definition of the state's revenue, state courts have accepted the legislature's notion that revenue includes only those taxes and other receipts from state sources in the Missouri budget, ignoring, of course, the billions of dollars in revenue received from the federal government that also is appropriated in the state's budget. [41] The choice of using only state revenue is defensible because revenue includes only the revenues over which the legislature has complete control. By this definition, the money allocated by the General Assembly for schools exceeds the 25 percent requirement.