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Ruling Upsets Legal Battles: A Judge's Decision Could Force Lawmakers to Seek a New Formula for Funding Charter Schools.

Posted on: Friday, 16 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

By Joe Robertson, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Jun. 16--The Kansas City School District should not be sharing any of its local tax levy revenue with charter schools, the federal judge in the district's desegregation case ruled Thursday.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple scrambled ongoing legal battles over how the state should be funding charter schools.

The school district's attorney, Maurice Watson, saw the ruling as a victory that should send lawmakers back to find a new formula for funding charters.

Charter schools attorney Chuck Hatfield said the bottom line is that charter students should get a fair portion of public money, regardless of what pot it comes from.

"The district wants the money, but the charter school is educating the child," Hatfield said.

A state law passed in 1998 allowed the creation of charter schools in Kansas City and St. Louis to operate as public schools under independent boards.

How to fund them has been an issue ever since.

Just over half the revenue generated for public schools in the Kansas City School District comes from its local tax levy. Most of the students, some 27,000, are in district schools. But more than 5,000 have been enrolled in the 17 charter schools.

The state law directed the Kansas City School District to pay charter schools an annual amount "equal to" a per-pupil cost that was determined through factors in the state's foundation formula that figured in local tax revenue.

Lawmakers included a provision that allowed the district to divert some of the local revenue that would have gone to charter schools to help pay off more than $300 million in bonds that had funded building construction and renovations ordered by the federal court during the desegregation era.

A year ago, the state's Board of Fund Commissioners determined the district no longer needed the withheld portion of charter school funding to finish paying off the bonds. The state declared that the withholding -- some $800 per student -- should end.

In a series of challenges to that decision, the school district resurrected a 1996 desegregation case settlement.

That court agreed to the settlement, the district argued, based partly on the assurance that the entire property tax levy would remain available to the district.

Whipple agreed.

In Thursday's ruling, the judge ordered that the state cannot divert any money from the levy to charter schools until 2014 â€"-- when the bonds are scheduled to be retired -- or when the bonds are paid off, whichever comes first.

A spokesman for Attorney General Jay Nixon said the state was reviewing Whipple's ruling and declined comment.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri)

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