DALLAS - Arizona will appeal a Maricopa County
Over five years, the ruling would provide $1.6 billion. With inflation factored in, the restored appropriation could come to $2.9 billion.
At a press conference July 17, Brewer said the state would appeal the ruling that "would be absolutely devastating to the state of Arizona, to public safety and the rest of our budget."
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper's order on July 11 came in response to a state Supreme Court order that she determine how funding should be allocated based on the high court's previous ruling in favor of the school districts.
The state's Supreme Court found last fall that the state Legislature violated Proposition 301, a ballot measure approved in 2000 calling for annual inflation adjustments to the school-funding formula.
Cooper said that payments totaling $1.6 billion over the next five years would reset the starting point for per-student school funding.
"The formula is cumulative," Cooper wrote in her ruling. "Each year, the adjustment should be 2% or the change in the GDP price deflator, whichever is less. Each year's adjustment includes the prior year's adjustment, so that the base level keeps pace with inflation. If an adjustment is not applied in a particular year, the base level for the following years is thrown off unless corrected."
A hearing is expected this fall on the question of whether the state also should have to pay schools an additional $1.3 billion for inflation costs that lawmakers did not provide during the recession.
Tim Ogle, executive director of the Arizona School Boards Association, called Cooper's ruling "a directive that the law can't be ignored and that our students and teachers won't lose any more ground."
"We have an entire cohort of early learners, beginning with the children who entered kindergarten in 2010 and are now entering fourth grade, who have never been in a properly funded classroom," Ogle said in a prepared statement on July 11, the day Cooper's ruling came down. "Today's ruling won't make up for that. What it will do is provide necessary relief to schools that have experienced some of the most extreme budget cuts in the nation over the past five years."
