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Columbus
Dispatch
Chief
justice says state
still not in compliance on school funding
By Catherine Candisky
June 4, 2013
Ohio
Supreme Court Chief
Justice Maureen O’Connor says state lawmakers have failed to fix the
way public
schools are financed since the high court in 2002 issued its last of
four
rulings that the funding system was unconstitutional.
“I
don’t think it’s
changed,” O’Connor said yesterday when asked during a meeting with The
Dispatch
editorial board about the General Assembly’s response to the DeRolph
decision.
“I’m
waiting like everyone
else to see what the legislature and the governor are going to do with
it.”
As
she pushes to improve
how judges are selected, O’Connor said judges and judicial candidates
should
feel free to discuss their philosophies and opinions on such current
topics as
school funding or abortion or capital punishment. But she said they
should
steer clear of commenting about specific legislation or situations that
could
come before them on the court.
O’Connor
did not decide the
DeRolph case, joining the court as an associate justice just weeks
after it was
decided, but she said she is frequently asked about it.
“I’ve
often explained to
people who say: ‘Why hasn’t the Supreme Court done anything? It’s still
unconstitutional, and the legislature has not come up with a
constitutional
fix.’ And I say, there is no case in front of the court ... we can’t
resurrect
a case to bring it before us.”
The
Ohio Supreme Court
first declared the funding system unconstitutional in 1997, calling for
a
“systematic overhaul” because of an overreliance on local property
taxes that
generated unequal revenue among the state’s 614 school districts.
O’Connor
limited her
comments to the decision and the legislative response, declining to
discuss a
funding formula currently being negotiated by Republican leaders in the
House
and Senate.
About
four months after she
took office as an associate justice, O’Connor concurred with DeRolph in
a 5-2
ruling that said, “The duty now lies with the General Assembly to
remedy an
educational system that has been found by the majority in DeRolph IV
(the
court’s previous decision, in December) to still be unconstitutional.”
O’Connor
was elected chief
justice in 2010.
Last
week, as Senate
Republicans laid out a revamped funding plan to replace one the House
used to
replace one proposed by Gov. John Kasich, Senate President Keith Faber,
R-Celina, said the new setup would be “absolutely constitutional…
Read
the rest of the
article at the Columbus Dispatch
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