Opinion ID: 2077353
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 23

Heading: Courts' Inability to Immediately Resolve School Funding Disputes

Text: As noted, a justiciable issue must be susceptible to immediate resolution and capable of present judicial enforcement. [79] But courts have been unable to immediately resolve school funding disputes. For example, after a decade of litigating the constitutionality of the state's school funding system and despite legislative enactments in the interim, the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the trial court's determination that the system was inadequate. The court stayed its mandate, however, to give the legislature an opportunity to implement appropriate changes. [80] When the legislature did not comply, the court recalled its mandate and appointed a master three separate times, despite dissents that the court had no jurisdiction to recall its mandate to examine subsequent legislation or to give orders to the legislature. [81] A similar history occurred in Kansas. The Kansas Supreme Court first reversed the trial court's dismissal of the case. [82] Two years later, it affirmed the trial court's judgment that the school funding system was constitutionally inadequate and required increased funding. The Kansas court also retained jurisdiction to allow the legislature time to correct the constitutional deficiencies. [83] Six months later, the court held that the new school financing scheme also failed to pass constitutional muster and ordered $285 million in additional appropriations for the next school year while the legislature made further corrections. [84] In 2006, the court finally dismissed the case after the state showed it had increased total funding to schools by an estimated $755.6 million. [85] Other states have entertained continuous appeals and ordered appropriations from state legislatures as judicial remedies. For example, the Texas Supreme Court has addressed the constitutionality of the state's school funding system six times since 1989. [86] The Alabama Supreme Court, after issuing four decisions in this case over the past nine years, conceded that the pronouncement of a specific remedy `from the bench' would necessarily represent an exercise of the power of that branch of government charged by the people of the State of Alabama with the sole duty to administer state funds to public schools: the Alabama Legislature. [87] The New Jersey Supreme Court first struck down the state's funding system in 1973. [88] A generation later, the court had decided a string of cases on the issue and struck down three enactments as unconstitutional. [89] In Abbott by Abbott, [90] the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered the state to increase funding to special needs districts by an amount that would equalize the average per-pupil expenditures in those districts with the average per-pupil expenditures in wealthier districts. The dissent noted that since 1990, the state had increased school funding to special needs districts by $850 million and estimated that the majority's ordered expenditures would amount to at least $248 million more. [91] Since 1997, the court has decided three additional appeals. [92] The volume of litigation and the extent of judicial oversight provide a chilling example of the thickets that can entrap a court that takes on the duties of a Legislature. [93] The landscape is littered with courts that have been bogged down in the legal quicksand of continuous litigation and challenges to their states' school funding systems. Unlike those courts, we refuse to wade into that Stygian swamp.