The California School Boards Association’s Education Legal Alliance, along with the San Diego COE, Riverside USD, San Jose USD and Clovis USD, has filed a lawsuit against the State of California challenging its authority to defer state mandate payments to public schools.
The case seeks to compel the state to comply with its constitutional obligation to fully reimburse school districts and county offices of education for all new programs or higher levels of service imposed upon them by the state. The case also seeks to set aside as unconstitutional those provisions of law by which the state has justified the “deferral” of its debt to school districts/county offices.
“The state expects schools to foot the bill for millions of dollars in mandated costs that they do not fund and rarely pay back,” said CSBA President Kathy Kinley. “Although the cost of the K-12 mandates for 2007-08 is estimated at $160 million, this year’s state budget appropriates only $38,000, or $1,000 per mandate statewide. The carry-over debt from prior years is approximately $415 million.”
For a number of years, CSBA, as well as ACSA and other education associations working on the state budget, have questioned the authority of the state to essentially defer payment of the 38 K-12 reimbursable state-mandated programs.
“This is a constitutional question that we in the education community should be asking,” said ACSA Management Services Executive Brett McFadden. “We’ve tried to work cooperatively with the state on this mandates issue for a long time. Unfortunately, that’s often been a one-sided dialogue, with us on the losing end of the equation. We can’t be expected to meet world-class standards without the necessary resources it takes to do that.”
Starting with the 2002-03 fiscal year, the Legislature has failed to include an appropriation in the budget act to fully fund the mandate claims submitted by school districts. Instead, the Legislature has included in the budget acts, and the governor has approved, only $1,000 per mandate, even though the costs of these mandates, and the claims submitted, far exceed that amount. The carried-over debt is known as the mandate “credit card debt.”
The 2006-07 state budget appropriated some $900 million to fund the accumulated debt and added some funding for ’06-07 mandates. However, this appropriation failed to pay off the past debt and was inadequate to cover the current-year obligation.
In the 2007-08 budget, the Legislature and the governor have again pulled out the credit card; thus, deferred payments are a reality along with a continuation of previous debt incurred.
School districts and county offices of education are being forced to bear the costs of new programs and higher levels of service mandated by the state, until some future time when the state chooses to appropriate funding. The last time this credit card debt occurred, school districts/county offices had to wait five fiscal years before any effort was made to pay off the deferred debt.