? During the 2015 session, Kansas lawmakers repealed the school funding formula that had been in place for more than 20 years and replaced it with a block-grant system that effectively froze funding in place for the next two years.

The rationale at the time was that it took two years to write the previous formula, which lawmakers had adopted in 1992, and so it seemed reasonable to give themselves two years this time to come up with a new formula.

But in the two years that have passed, the Legislature has done virtually nothing toward developing a new formula.

Instead, the past two years have been dominated by one budget crisis after another, and a special session in 2016 devoted to answering a Kansas Supreme Court order on school finance that threatened to close down public schools if lawmakers didn’t immediately fix certain equity problems.

House and Senate leaders didn’t even appoint interim study committees that could have taken testimony and held hearings on various school funding alternatives.

Now, with the block-grant system set to expire on June 30, and Gov. Sam Brownback saying he is not interested in extending it for another year, the 2017 Legislature, with more than 50 brand new members, faces the daunting challenge of having to write a new funding formula from scratch.

Kansas Education Commissioner Randy Watson said he’s now worried that lawmakers won’t be able to meet the deadline.

“What concerns me is that some people are saying maybe we’ll have to extend the block grant for another year because this is complicated and we have to write a new school finance formula,” Watson said. “As I remember, the reason we did the block grant was to give us two years to write a new school finance formula. And while there was talk, there didn’t seem to be much tangible effort.”

One of the brand new lawmakers who will be working on the project in 2017 is Rep.-elect Jim Karleskint, R-Tonganoxie, who has been assigned to the new K-12 Education Budget Committee, which is expected to come up with a House version of a new formula.

“Hopefully, we can get it done this session, but it’ll be a large task,” Karleskint said. “From what I’ve been told, we’re going to start right away spending a great deal of time in committee and working at it.”

The major reason why it took lawmakers two years to write the last formula in the 1990s is that school finance is an issue that divides people along more than just partisan or ideological lines. There are also sharp differences, experts say, between the interests of big school districts and small ones, between urban and rural districts, wealthy and poor communities, and between growing suburbs and shrinking small towns.

“I think the biggest challenge is, it’s a time-intensive task trying to meet the needs of 286 school districts,” said G.A. Buie, executive director of United School Administrators of Kansas, a group that represents superintendents and other administrators.

New legal standard

This time around, though, there are even more complicating factors in the school finance debate, starting with the Kansas Supreme Court’s new legal standard for judging whether overall funding is adequate.

In 2005, during the school finance lawsuit Montoy v. Kansas, the court said funding must be based on the actual cost of providing all the educational services the state required.

But in 2014, in the current lawsuit, Gannon v. Kansas, the court overturned itself and set a new legal standard, one based on educational outcomes.

It said that funding must be sufficient to meet what are called the “Rose standards,” which basically means the funding must ensure that when students graduate, they have sufficient knowledge and skills in areas like communications, civics, career preparation, art and literature, and physical and mental health so they can be full participants in their communities.

As the Legislature gets ready to start the 2017 session, it is also waiting on another Supreme Court decision, hoping it will provide some direction about what kind of funding formula will pass constitutional muster.

Karleskint, who spent six years teaching school finance for doctoral students at Baker University, said that if the court rules that a new formula must be based on outcomes, crafting such a formula will be extremely difficult.

“The Rose standards came out of Kentucky several years ago, and there have been various attempts at writing formulas which reflect those standards, and I’m not aware of any state that’s been successful at it because it’s such a moving target,” he said.

Both Karleskint and Watson said they think a new formula could be written using the same basic elements as the 1992 plan — a base amount of per-pupil funding for each district, with weightings to provide additional money for hard-to-teach populations like low-income students and English language learners, and some amount of local discretion to raise money above and beyond what the state provides.

But Mark Tallman, of the Kansas Association of School Boards, said Friday that nobody is entirely sure that would pass under the Supreme Court’s new outcomes-based legal standard.

“We don’t know that the old formula would pass muster,” Tallman said. “… The court is still looking at how to apply their new test.”

Trump administration

Another potential complicating factor this year is the election of Donald Trump as president and his efforts to push through national legislation to promote “school choice” alternatives such as private school vouchers and charter schools, which are privately operated schools that receive public funding.

The school choice movement also has its advocates in the Kansas Legislature, although to date they have had only limited success in pushing through choice initiatives, such as tax credits for corporate contributions to private school scholarship funds.

Watson said regardless of what happens in Congress, he doesn’t think proposals for charter schools or private school vouchers will gain much footing in Kansas.

“Our state constitution really limits money going to parochial interests and has some things that would really limit our ability to do charters from a constitutional standpoint,” he said. “That being said, I think also if you look at the rural nature of our state, charters and vouchers make little sense because the vast majority of schools in Kansas are remote enough that it’s not profitable to bring other schools in.”

Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos, a national leader of the school choice movement, to be secretary of education. Her confirmation hearings are set for Wednesday in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts is a member.