Separate but Unequal: One School District's Struggle for Fair Educational Facilities Funding in New Mexico

• Publication year: 2021
• Citation: Vol. 83

83 Nebraska L. Rev. 882. Separate But Unequal: One School District's Struggle for Fair Educational Facilities Funding in New Mexico

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Ronald J. VanAmberg*

Separate But Unequal: One School District's Struggle for Fair Educational Facilities Funding in New Mexico

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction ...................................................... 882
II. Zuni Litigation and Funding Requests ........................... 882
III. Conclusion ...................................................... 892

I. INTRODUCTION

The following are my personal thoughts as attorney for the Zuni School District on the ongoing litigation over capital improvement funding in New Mexico. Zuni initiated the litigation. It was subsequently joined by the Grants-Cibola School District represented by Bruce Boynton and the Gallup-McKinley Independent School District represented by George Kozeliski. The litigation has been truly collaborative. This Article contains only key thoughts and opinions and should not reflect on either Bruce or George.

II. ZUNI LITIGATION AND FUNDING REQUESTS

The Zuni Public School District is the first Native-American-controlled independent public school district in the nation, established by the Zuni tribal members to meet the needs of their children. Following a fourteen-year community effort, the District was formed on July 1, 1980.

In the 1970s, New Mexico tackled the critical and divisive issue of the wide disparity in the abilities of school districts to raise operational funding. Funding for school operations at this time was based upon local revenues. Districts with healthy bonding capacities had a

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clear advantage over those without. Around this time, the case of Natanobah v. Board of Education of the Gallup-McKinley School District(fn1) was filed, which raised an equal protection argument because facility expenditures within the school district were apparently not equitably distributed between the schools within the districts. This litigation may have had some effect on expediting the New Mexico Legislature's efforts to statutorily restructure operational funding.

The New Mexico Legislature eventually developed an "equalization formula" for operational funding.(fn2) Local bonding was now minimized as a vehicle for operational funds. Instead, a variety of funding sources were pooled through deposits into the State's general fund. Distributions to school districts were made based on district student counts, with a variety of statutory adjustments for factors that increased operational costs, such as small student populations, large rural areas, and the like.(fn3)

Following this effort, the State declared that the similar inequity in capital improvement funding would be the next funding issue addressed. However, nothing happened. Over the ensuing decades, as in the previous years, most school districts financed their capital improvements using their local bonding capacities. Those that had little bonding capacity went hat-in-hand to the State's capital outlay committee and literally begged for funding. Money from that legislative committee was distributed to districts without reference to any recognizable standard. The annual distribution event had a Christmas party atmosphere, with awards being announced, followed by applause for the beneficent committee members. The usual pattern was to partially fund district requests. Any substantial project which relied upon this process would usually require repeated annual visits to the committee. Meanwhile, districts with appreciable bonding capacities built state-of-the-art facilities. Over the next two decades, the gap between the wealthy and the poor school districts widened. Zuni was one of the poor school districts.

Zuni's facilities for the most part were old, deteriorating, and in deplorable condition. Most electrical wiring was from fifty to eighty years old, wearing thin, short-circuiting, and unable to support modern technology. Gas lines were of a similar condition, with gas leaks constantly plaguing the district. A disaster nearly occurred in a classroom where a serious short-circuit developed contemporaneously with an undiscovered gas leak in the same room. A 1914 cast iron water pipe, with lead patchings, was discovered and replaced. Water was not potable in most facilities. The heating was generally a jerry

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rigged combination of old boilers, water heaters and space heaters, none of which were adequate and all of which presented risks. Air conditioning was either inadequate or nonexistent. Most roofs needed replacement. Some facility walls were split open, forcing abandonment of some classrooms. The Zuni facilities were worlds apart from those enjoyed by many other districts.

The Zuni district is contained within the confines of the Zuni Reservation which consists almost entirely of land held in trust by the United States for the Pueblo of Zuni. There is no ability to tax such federal trust property.(fn4) Zuni was limited to taxing some mobile homes and electric transmission lines, which produced little revenue. Efforts to work with the State Department of Education and the legislature to develop a source for reliable capital improvement funding were fruitless. In January 1998, Zuni filed suit in the district court in McKinley County, New Mexico.(fn5)

The local district judge assigned to the case was a retired FBI agent in his sixties suffering from some health problems and having to deal with everything from domestic relations and criminal matters to now a challenge to the constitutionality of the State's system for funding capital improvements for school districts. The judge was clearly concerned about the issue even though the litigation had the potential to overwhelm an already bulging docket.

In October 1998, the Gallup and Grants school districts joined as plaintiffs. The Gallup school district is large and sprawling and includes a large area of land within the Navajo Nation. Not only is Gallup's tax base also compromised, it is faced with the daunting task of having to build educational facilities to service remote pockets of populations. The Grants school...