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Lawsuit over state's school funding as inadequate far-reaching

denver and the west By Tim Hoover The Denver Post Posted: 10/25/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT With a court ruling last week, Colorado is set to enter the battlefield of "adequacy" in school funding, a place dozens of other states have been before with mixed results. But the case against the state's school funding system ultimately could be about more than money for education, attorneys say. It could wind up as a direct challenge to the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights in the state constitution. TABOR limits government spending and requires that tax increases go to voters. School finance lawsuits are not new to Colorado or indeed almost every other state. Over three decades, Colorado has faced several legal challenges to its school-funding system. But those cases have primarily focused on "equity" in school funding — whether the money that is collected is being distributed fairly. The state won a major equity case in the early 1980s, but lawmakers rewrote the school finance system twice after that, with the most recent overhaul in 1994. What is different about the current suit, filed in 2005, is that it challenges the "adequacy" of the state's school funding. That is, whether the amount spent is enough to provide a "thorough and uniform" system of public schools as called for in the constitution. The state budget this year calls for spending a total of $4.7 billion on public schools, of which $3.2 billion comes from the general fund, the state's primary pot of money for operating expenses. Spending for public schools