Deciding who should prevail in a lawsuit challenging the legality of state funding for Arkansas public schools is a "mind-boggling exercise," the judge who will decide the case told lawyers Friday after a five-day trial on the question.
"I have no idea ... where I am going," Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza said. "I've been struggling for a while and I guess I'll struggle some more."
Arkansas' school funding formulas are complex to begin with, the judge said, but the case becomes even more difficult to decide because he also must be mindful of the constitutional limits placed on the judiciary by the separation-of-powers clause, which restricts how much authority he can assert over the legislative and executive branches.
Piazza told the attorneys that once he makes up his mind, he'll either reconvene them to announce his ruling or issue a written opinion.
Regardless, his decision will be scrutinized by the Arkansas Supreme Court.
The Deer/Mount Judea School District's lawsuit accuses lawmakers of returning to a funding procedure that the Supreme Court has ruled illegal.
In doing so, legislators are unfairly shorting Newton County students by denying the district sufficient funding to pay its transportation costs and provide a competitive wage for teachers, the lawsuit argues.
After four days of testimony, four witnesses from the plaintiff school district and nine witnesses for the state -- including two former state education commissioners, the lawyers presented two hours of closing arguments Friday.
On behalf of the school district, attorney Bill Lewellen of Marianna told the judge that the funding system, based on assessing the needs of a 500-student school, is fundamentally unfair to small districts like the 355-pupil Deer/Mount Judea district.
The funding is so complicated, barely a handful of members of the Legislature understands how it works, Lewellen said, adding that the Arkansas Department of Education and the governor's office "want them to stay ignorant."
"Ninety-four percent of the General Assembly have no idea how to interpret the school-funding laws," said Lewellen, a former Democratic state senator.
"Most don't know the system and most don't want to know. Laws are passed because four or five people get up and say, 'this is the way it should be ... because we've studied it,' and the rest vote aye."
He said if legislators really knew that 4-year-old children were being forced to spend two hours one-way on a school bus with no restroom breaks, they would do something about it, describing that situation as "inhumane."
Lewellen called on the judge to reject "numerical mumbo-jumbo" arguments by state lawyers that Deer/Mount Judea is fairly funded when compared with similarly situated schools.
"All they're saying is, 'All you poor folks are being treated equally with all of the other poor folks,'" Lewellen said. "All that tells me is we're poor and we need to settle for being poor."
Assistant Attorney General Roslyn Middleton told the judge to look at how Deer/Mount Judea handles its own finances if he wants to see the school system's real motivation in suing the state.
The district doesn't spend all of the money it gets now, holding back an average of 29 percent, she said.
"This case is about misplaced [financial] priorities," she said. "They keep saying they're doing the best they can, but if they were, they wouldn't be in this situation."
Middleton accused the district of initiating the lawsuit to try to push other districts out of the transportation funding set aside for geographically isolated districts.
She questioned why the district would pay its superintendent a bonus linked to transportation funding if that money was really so precious to it.
"Deer/Mount Judea is simply trying to increase its share of the [transportation] pie," she said.
The Legislature has regularly increased per-pupil funding for the schools -- it's up by 23 percent since 2008, she told the judge.
Lawmakers also have significantly boosted the amount Deer/Mount Judea gets for impoverished students and alternative learning programs, she said.
Deer/Mount Judea teachers are paid at a rate of 118 percent of the median income of the community, Middleton said.
A state expert has recommended spending cuts that would allow it to substantially boost teacher pay, she said.
School officials like to compare their teacher pay with more affluent districts in Fort Smith and Springdale to complain about how poorly their educators are paid, she said.
But what those salary differences really show is that those communities have made a choice to raise taxes to pay their teachers better, she said. Deer/Mount Judea has chosen not to, Middleton told the judge.
"They have failed to invest in their own [students]," she said. "Deer/Mount Judea has failed to make an efficient use of its dollars. That failure should not result in a ruling that the entire [funding] system is unconstitutional."
Clay Fendley, the district's lead attorney, dismissed the state expert's recommended budget cuts as "complete fantasy" that would drive families away from the district.
"We can't continue to operate under the system we have," he said. "All we're trying to do is prove they're not complying with Act 57 [the financing law] and we've been harmed by that."
He reminded the judge that Deer/Mount Judea hasn't asked for any damages. He said the district wants what the constitution guarantees and the courts say is required: funding for schools that guarantees every child has an opportunity at an adequate education.
"What we're asking for is a rational funding system," he said. "It's not that we're asking for more money."
Lawmakers have made increasing demands on school districts regarding teacher pay and benefits, but they haven't provided districts the extra money they need to pay those higher costs, Fendley said.
The teacher-pay disparity among school districts is "the best indication. It shows conclusively that [school financing] is unequal," he said.
Poor, rural Deer/Mount Judea needs a way to pay a competitive salary to attract better teachers, he said.
The statewide average teacher salary is about $48,000 while the most the district can pay a teacher is $43,200, he said.
"We can't compete for teachers. We need to be paying more to draw people. The key to improving [student] achievement is improving instruction," Fendley told the judge. "The state has a duty to overcome our inability to raise millage. It's not that we're not taxing ourselves."
Metro on 02/27/2016