Impact of Victory in Lobato? Depends on Your Perspective . . .
Reporter Tim Hoover posed an important question in the Sunday Denver Post:
With a broad coalition of parents and school districts suing the state to get more money for K-12 schools, legal experts and politicians say that despite dire predictions of financial Armageddon for Colorado, there’s no easy answer to an obvious question:What happens if the plaintiffs win?
Hoover’s article surveyed the perspectives of a number of elected officials about what would result from a plaintiff victory in the Lobato case.
They made predictions about budget calamity and voter behavior. But none answered the question of what such a victory would mean for the children of Colorado.
For the children of Colorado, a victory would elevate the provision of the Colorado constitution that mandates their access to “a thorough and uniform system of free public schools” closer to the level of importance the legislature gives provisions protecting adult interests (such as TABOR and Gallagher).
By now it is widely recognized that Colorado’s constitution is at war with itself, with competing provisions and formulas that have tied the state in knots. What is not as obvious is that the reason we have not already reached a point of “financial Armageddon” is because Colorado’s students have been silently absorbing the impact of Colorado’s constitutional crisis for decades.
The interests of students are written into the constitution in at least two obvious ways, once in the Education Clause (“thorough and uniform”), and the other through the citizen initiative passed in 2000, Amendment 23.
Neither provision is currently being honored.Automatic property tax reductions driven by the interaction of the Gallagher amendment, TABOR, and the School Finance Act have reduced the annual local contribution to schools by an estimated annual $2-3 billion. Some of that has been absorbed by increases in state funding. Much of it has been absorbed by cuts in school districts. So, for instance, students in Center, Colorado have no access to AP courses and at-risk students throughout the state don’t receive the additional resources experts know are necessary to close achievement gaps. That’s not thorough or uniform.
Likewise, when the Great Recession made it difficult to comply with the mandatory minimum per pupil increases required by Amendment 23, there was little question as to which constitutional provision had to bend. The legislature implemented an absurd interpretation of Amendment 23, where cuts to per pupil funding were deemed to satisfy Amendment 23′s required increases.
Hence, the analysis by the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute that Colorado is now $906 per pupil behind Amendment 23 funding requirements. (That’s a total of $774 million). Once again, students pay the price.
Ultimately, if the Lobato suit is successful, it will make an enormous difference for Colorado students. It will finally put the Education Clause on equal footing with other provisions of the constitution, so that we as a state have to make intentional decisions about our priorities. Otherwise, Colorado children will continue to silently bear the cost of our constitutional conflicts.
How fitting that the name of the public interest law firm representing the plaintiffs in Lobato is “Children’s Voices.”
Related posts:
