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Published Wednesday, November 16, 2011 12:09 AMThe College Station school board on Tuesday decided to join litigation against the state in hopes of changing the school finance system.
The district will spend $12,500 to join the Fort Worth, Houston and Rockdale districts in a lawsuit that will be filed by the Houston law firm of Thompson and Horton.
Board members said such legal action is the only way to force changes in an inequitable system.
"To sit and let it be put up to chance, I don't know if that would be representing our school district or our community well," said board vice president Paul Dorsett.
Superintendent Eddie Coulson said the district's state funding has been reduced by 9 percent since 2005.
The state has dramatically reduced or eliminated funding for intervention programs while at the same time raising expectations for students, he said, through such actions as implementing the STAAR end-of-course testing program, a more rigorous replacement for the TAKS testing program.
The firm will seek a ruling that will compel the Legislature to adequately fund public education and tie that funding to the standards and requirements set by the state, he said.
Trying to find a way to treat all of the state's more than 1,200 public schools equally when it comes to education funding isn't a new endeavor. Local educators blame the current inequities on legislators' response to a decision made a few years ago to change the system.
In 2006, the Texas Supreme Court decided the funding system amounted to a state property tax, which isn't allowed in the Texas Constitution. At the time, almost all school districts were taxing at the maximum rate of $1.50 per $100 of assessed property value.
To fix that, local school property tax rates were reduced by one-third under order of the state. Dedicated state money was supposed to replace what was lost. The change also froze the level of per-student revenue at what each district was getting. It was designed to be a temporary fix. Five years later, districts still are being funded by the state at the 2006 level -- a problem, educators say, because it doesn't address enrollment growth.
To top it off, this summer districts faced unprecedented budget cuts for the biennium. The state grappled with a $23 billion budget shortfall and allocated $4 billion less than schools historically received to account for student enrollment growth.
Source: http://www.theeagle.com/local/CS-schools-to-join-ligitation-lawsuit--6776952
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