The AISD board of trustees voted Monday night to become one of seven Texas school district plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the state’s system of public school finance, a few days after Dallas ISD, the second largest Texas district, did the same. The lawsuit — first filed in April of 2001 and known as West Orange-Cove CISD v. Alanis — argues that the school finance system has become an unconstitutional statewide property tax; too many districts have been forced to tax at the maximum rate allowed by state law, the suit says, and thereby have lost effective local control. The board unanimously passed a prepared resolution read by trustee Robert Schneider, authorizing the lawsuit and an initial expenditure of $50,000 to hire the law firms Bracewell & Patterson and Haynes and Boone as co-counsel.
In authorizing the suit, the AISD board’s resolution cited six “specific objectives”:
maintaining or increasing equity;
establishing adequate resources to fulfill constitutional and regulatory requirements;
preserving local control of programs and taxation;
building capacity for growth;
providing adequate resources for special needs students; and
eliminating or reducing the reliance on recapture (“Robin Hood”) to adequately fund poorer districts.
Although the suit has been widely viewed as an attempt by property-wealthy districts to eliminate the recapture system, board Chair Doyle Valdez insisted the suit is “not about Robin Hood” and that the board deeply supports equity in the state’s entire school finance system. (Four suburban, property-wealthy school districts subject to recapture were the initial plaintiffs, but Dallas is not a recapture district. AISD, meanwhile, is the only major urban district in the state that loses money to Robin Hood.) The board passed the resolution following an executive session and work session with attorneys David Thompson and Mark Trachtenberg, who said they expected that the state district court would wait until next year, to see if the Legislature acts on school finance, before moving forward with the case. “I do not expect any lawsuit to result in a court order to the Legislature,” said Thompson, but the court could provide “guidelines or certain principles” within which legislators could reform the system. The attorneys said that state Supreme Court, in recently remanding the case to district court, repeatedly emphasized the constitutional requirement of equity. Thompson said that reform will require significant state resources. “To solve the problem is going to take state revenue,” he said. “To replace 10 cents of property tax revenue requires $1 billion a year … and that’s not allowing for any growth in the system.”
“We want a message of partnership between the districts and the state,” said AISD Superintendent Pat Forgione. “We believe the outcome would be a win, win, win situation — for the state, the students, and the school districts.”
This article appears in October 3 • 2003.
