March 07, 2013 11:49 AM UTC

Lobato vs. Colorado at the Colorado Supreme Court

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• by: Colorado Pols

9NEWS reports, a portentous set of oral arguments just finished before the Colorado Supreme Court:

It will be months before the Supreme Court issues a ruling, which could have a major affect [sic] on the state budget…

"We're a wealthy state," said Kathleen Gebhardt, founder of Children's Voices, a non-profit law firm which advocates for education. "We're in the top 10 for wealth and in the bottom for funding our students."

Gebhardt is an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit of Lobato vs. the State of Colorado. The lawsuit, which has been initially upheld in district court, states that school funding is not equal across the state of Colorado and that is a violation of the state constitution. The case is currently under appeal.

According to the Colorado Department of Education and Gebhardt, schools receive an average of $6,474 per pupil in tax dollars.

"And, that puts us well into the bottom quadrant of all other states," Gebhardt said. "That worries me greatly about Colorado."

The district court ruling, which we discussed when it was issued back in 2011, was a thorough 180+ page indictment of the present state of Colorado's education system. District Judge Sheila Rappaport found that Colorado's public education funding system is not "rationally related" to the increasing requirements imposed on it–and that the state is unconstitutionally violating the Education Clause in the Colorado Constitution, which requires a "thorough and uniform" public education system.

If plaintiffs prevail, what could follow is a massive and court-mandated shakeup of not just education funding, but just about every other publicly-funded program in the state of Colorado as priorities obligatively shift to comply. The potential major upheaval this could create is a big reason why Gov. John Hickenlooper and others, even many who would support a large systemic change in support of public education, to oppose plaintiffs and argue that creating a "thorough and uniform" education system is a responsibility of the elected legislature–not the courts.

Recognizing the difficulty in striking a balance between these competing rational arguments, but mindful of the stories of severe hardship in many chronically underfunded school districts around the state, we've been anticipating this showdown for some time.