In the opening lectures this semester we mentioned that the Texas Constitution contains language related to the need for the legislature to adequately fund public education in the state and that a lawsuit followed the $5 billion in cuts made to the education budget following the 82nd session of the legislature.
Click here for a few stories related to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit was put on hold once the 83rd session of the legislature restored $3.9 billion, but the lawsuit is back on track.
From the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal:
Click here for a few stories related to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit was put on hold once the 83rd session of the legislature restored $3.9 billion, but the lawsuit is back on track.
From the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal:
The second school funding trial began Tuesday with this basic argument from the attorneys representing the more than 600 school districts in the state suing the Texas Legislature: Despite the $3.9 billion the lawmakers restored to public education funding in last year’s session, the same old problems continue because of inequitable funding.
“Nothing has changed,” argued David Hinojosa, lead school finance attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or MALDEF. The San Antonio-based organization represents some of the property-tax poorest districts in the state and a group of parents, including two from Amarillo.
The system is also inefficient because it is not producing results, Hinojosa and other attorneys told State District Judge John Dietz.
But Texas Assistant Attorney General Shelly Dahlberg countered that the funding of the public education system is constitutional.
In last year’s session, when the Legislature restored most of the funding cuts made in the 2011 session when the lawmakers tackled a $27 billion shortfall, the state narrowed the funding gap in the overwhelming majority of all school districts, Dahlberg told Dietz.
“The Legislature also improved the equity of the system,” she said in reference to one of the key arguments the plaintiffs used when they sued the state two years ago.
From the Texas Tribune:
With the Texas school finance trial reopening Tuesday, state district court Judge John Dietz is set to consider how changes made during the 2013 legislative session could affect his February ruling that the state has underfunded its public schools.
Attorneys for the state will spend the next four weeks arguing that new high school graduation requirements and the $3.4 billion lawmakers added back to the public education budget in 2013 should change his mind. But the most prominent player in the state’s defense of the lawsuit could remain outside the courtroom, where the trial has become a political football in the state’s heated 2014 gubernatorial contest.
The leading Republican candidate for governor, Greg Abbott, is also the state’s attorney general. His office is responsible for the state’s defense against the more than two-thirds of Texas school districts that are suing over what they say is an inadequate and unfair funding system in a case that is expected to travel to the state Supreme Court.
He said last week that he does not plan to appear in court during the latest hearings. That has not stopped his expected Democratic opponent, Wendy Davis, from lobbing attacks based on his role in the litigation. Davis, a Fort Worth state senator, has her own connection to the school finance lawsuit. In 2011, she filibustered the 2011 budget bill that enacted the $5.4 billion in cuts that led to the litigation that arose two summers ago.
Tribpedia contains full background of the case.
