GUEST COLUMNIST: Legislative branch, not courts, must manage school finance

I was hoping the Colorado Supreme Court had read the Colorado Constitution.  

Article IX, section 2 clearly mandates that “the General Assembly …. provide for the establishment and maintenance of a thorough and uniform system of free public school throughout the state…”  The liberals on the Supreme Court, Justices Michael Bender, Mary Mullarkey, Alex Martinez and Gregory Hobbs, decided words “General Assembly” actually refer to the “Court System of Colorado”.

Initiated in 2005, Labato v. State challenged the current state school finance system as violating the “thorough and uniform” clause of the Colorado Constitution.  The claim was that Colorado’s public schools are underfunded and therefore “inadequate.”  

They asked the court to declare the General Assembly’s School Finance Act unconstitutional and to add insult to injury, to ignore the Colorado Constitution and have the Court retain jurisdiction over the issue.  In other words, they asked the Court to become the “General Assembly” and write a new school finance act.  The district court dismissed the claim, rightly stating Amendment 23 had set the standards for educational funding. 

When appealed to the Court of Appeals, the judges there wrote that there are “no judicially manageable standards to assess the constitutionality of the public school finance system.”  They also recognized:  “that judicial attempts to evaluate educational adequacy and financing would require excessive intrusion into questions of social policy and appropriations, both being questions constitutional reserved for the Legislature.”  

So what is “adequate” and why would the plaintiffs think that a judge, as opposed to the General Assembly, should make that determination?  Could it be because the plaintiffs believed that liberal judges might give them a lot more money? 

We hear a lot in Colorado that we fund K-12 education at the 49th level of all states.  People citing that statistic always use a per capita comparison because Colorado has the 10th highest per capita income of all the states in 2007 as determined by the U.S. Census Bureau. 

They never tell you the actual funding amount was $12,080 dollars per student for the school year 2007-2008 for all funds, local, state and federal.  This information by the way is from the Colorado Department of Education website.  Neither do they say that Colorado was 24th highest in the nation during the 2006-2007 school year as determined by the American Legislative Exchange Council.  But maybe, the plaintiffs thought, we can initiate a law suit and get the courts to redefine “adequacy” and require even more funding. 

Three Colorado Supreme Court Justices dissented:   Justice Nancy Rice, Nathan Coats and Allison Eid. In their dissent, they wrote that “this court is not in a position to devise a judicially manageable standard on which to evaluate the adequacy or thoroughness of an education.  There is no precedent to guide our hand in fashioning a standard, creating the unacceptable appearance of an arbitrary judicial decree.  We have consistently held that the courts must avoid making decisions that are intrinsically legislative.  It is not up to the court to make policy or to weigh policy.  If we determine that the issue is legitimately one over which the General Assembly has authority, then our inquiry must end.”  

Having served on two interim school finance committees, one in 2005 and the other one this year, I am totally convinced that the courts of the state of Colorado will not serve the students in our schools any better than the General Assembly. School finance is very complicated and has been thoroughly discussed and debated by all sides. 

Colorado has many competing interests and diversities.  We have small school districts, a diverse cost of living throughout the state, a large variety of students considered to be at-risk, and a huge variance of how local districts can support their schools.  The General Assembly has listened to all those concerns. 

Now, however, a single judge will decide what is best.  Maybe it is time to exercise our rights as voters and let the Justices know what we think of their decision when they come up for retention a year from now.  

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Keith King is the state Senator from Colorado’s Senate District 12.  You can email King at keith@keithking.org.