Suit by Schools Seeks Balance in State Funding

Charging that the state has failed to comply with a state Supreme Court decision mandating equal funding to school districts, 17 California school districts on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig in an effort to balance state aid to school districts.

The lawsuit, filed in Orange County Superior Court, charges that the state has failed to live up to the 1974 Serrano vs. Priest decision, which held that wide funding gaps between school districts violated equal protection provisions of the state Constitution. The decision was upheld by the California Supreme Court in 1976.

The suit, which charges that the state’s current school financing formula treats children “in an invidious and irrational manner,” will be handled by John McDermott, a Los Angeles attorney who tried the first Serrano-Priest case through its Supreme Court hearing. The action seeks a ruling that the state’s school financing system is unconstitutional and a directive to the Legislature “to devise a constitutional system of finance” within one year, with periodic progress reports to the court from Honig.

Honig could not be reached for comment. Joseph Symkowick, general counsel for the state Department of Education, said a similar case heard in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1983 found that the current financing system “met the test of the equal protection clause of the (state) Constitution.” The state Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in September, 1987.

The Capistrano Unified School District in south Orange County organized the suit. Other districts named as plaintiffs in the suit include Magnolia Elementary district in Orange County; New Haven Unified, Alameda County; Delano Union Elementary, Kern County; Lucia Mar Unified, San Luis Obispo County; Laguna Salada Union Elementary, San Mateo County; Oak Grove Elementary, Santa Clara County, and Barstow Unified and Redlands Unified, both San Bernardino County.

At a press conference at the Capistrano district headquarters in San Juan Capistrano, McDermott said that while the Legislature has made “significant strides” in bringing the state into compliance with Serrano-Priest, it has failed to fully comply with the 1974 ruling of Judge Bernard S. Jefferson, who ordered funding disparities among school districts to be reduced to less than $100 per pupil by 1980. Some school districts often receive up to $1,000 less per student than other districts in the same county, McDermott charged.

Jefferson’s ruling “was supposed to get the job done, and here we are in 1990 and the job still isn’t done,” McDermott said. “There is no mechanism currently in place in state law to get rid of those inequalities.”