Kansas facing bigger fights over schools after funding fix

(AP) — Kansas is bracing for more contentious legal and political fights over education funding even after legislators approved a narrow, short-term fix to satisfy a court mandate and avoid a threatened shutdown of the state's public schools.

Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and the GOP-dominated Legislature's leaders already have committed to rewriting school funding laws next year.

Besides overhauling how money is distributed among the state's 286 local districts, they also want to rethink academic standards and use state funds to improve students' performance.

Brownback called the session to respond to a state Supreme Court ruling last month that the education funding system remained unfair to poor school districts, despite three rounds of changes in education finance laws in three years.

Amid the litigation, Republican legislators last year junked the state's 1990s-era per-pupil funding formula in favor of predictable grants to districts that allowed lawmakers to better control state spending.