Washington State Supreme Court Uphold Its Charter Law Ruling
The Court released its ruling today and upheld its decision to strike down the charter school law. The ruling was 6-3. The decision in the original ruling becomes final on December 14th.
The majority did strike out one footnote (page 11, footnote 10) about the use of School District No. 20 v. Bryan. A bit interesting as this does revolve around Article IX on funding but they were likely addressing the issue of funding for other education programs.
The dissenters said: (partial)
"various amici have raised legitimate questions regarding the use of unrestricted funds and the power of the legislature to act. These questions touch upon the impact of our decision on other public, non-common school programs. Granting reconsideration would provide an opportunity for appellants to respond to the motions for this court to clarify our decision and to expressly limit our ruling to the case before us so that the legislature can chose to act, or not, without fear of another constitutional challenge and additional litigation."Again, two wrongs don't make a right. If there are education programs being wrongly funded, the legislature can figure that out. It still won't make this law constitutional if other programs' funding gets changed.
This presents an tough problem for the charters.
- When is their funding cut off? November or December?
- What about the Charter Commission - it cannot exist without state funding so even if charters get their own funding to go on, who oversees the ones that are not overseen by a school district?