Gov. Mike Beebe said Friday that he’s still “a little irritated” about the state Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling last week saying the state cannot force wealthier school districts to surrender excess property-tax revenue to subsidize poorer districts.
Beebe told the Arkansas School Boards Association that he doesn’t want the state to go “backwards” in public education.
“Sometimes I wonder about the Supreme Court, but it was a 4-3 decision, so obviously I think three of them got it right,” Beebe told the audience during a speech in Little Rock.
The association was holding its annual meeting at the Peabody Little Rock hotel.
The state mandates thateach school district receive enough money to provide an adequate education - $6,267 per student in 2012-13.
Each district has a uniform tax rate of 25 mills. In most places, the tax raises less than $6,267 per student, so the state makes up for the shortfall.
But a few districts collect more than the mandated funding.
State officials demanded that this excess money be surrendered, but the Fountain Lake School District in Hot Springs and the Eureka Springs School District refused.
A lawsuit followed.
State officials argued that Amendment 74 - which mandated the special 25-mill education tax - authorized the state to level the playing field and provide equal funding to all districts.
But the court ruled that each school district is entitled to keep all tax revenue it collects.
The money is a “special tax,” not a state tax and the state is not entitled to seize the money and redistribute it, the court said.
The court’s decision won’t cost poor schools a nickel. The state will pick up the tab whenever school districts fall short of pupil funding.
“Is that going to break the state? No,” Beebe told the crowd.
“So what is the big hangup here?” Beebe asked. “It is no big deal in terms of total money across the state.
“The big deal is I don’t want the next governor or agovernor after the next governor or the next Legislature or a Legislature that wants to push a governor around or anybody else for that matter somehow changing this priority that we have got about public education that was established by these court cases [over the past 30 or so years] that set education over and above just about any other obligation of the state,” he said.
“If you can start tinkering with parts of that decision, if you can start saying that parts of that constitutional amendment [Amendment 74] are subject to really totally different kinds of interpretation than anybody ever thought, if you can do all that on thisissue, what can you do on these other issues?”
He said Education Week has ranked Arkansas as No. 5 in public education and that’s a testament to the state’s progress during the past 30 years.
Beebe, a Democrat, has been governor since 2007, was attorney general from 2003-2007 and a state senator from 1983-2003.
He said he was one of the principal authors of Amendment 74 of the Arkansas Constitution - approved by voters in 1996 - that the divided court “now claims says something it didn’t say, so I think I know more about it than they do, but they got more power than I do in interpreting the law.”
Beebe said the bad news for him is that he has to do what the court says and “we will live with whatever the court says and we will obey court orders.
“The good news for me is they can’t shut me up,” he said, referring to the state Supreme Court.
When asked if the governor is trying to jawbone the court into changing its mind, Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said Beebe “is not going to be out there stumping to change the court’s mind.”
“He is going to keep expressing his mind,” DeCample said.
He said Beebe supports Attorney General Dustin Mc-Daniel’s plan to petition the Supreme Court to rehear the case.
DeCample said the governor realizes that even when the court grants a rehearing of a case, that’s often not successful in changing the court’s mind. But when rehearings are successful in changing the court’s mind, they tend to be in closely divided rulings such as this one, he said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/08/2012