By Patrick Crowley
The Cincinnati Enquirer

COVINGTON - Nineteen years ago, Jack Moreland, then superintendent of schools in Dayton, Ky., was instrumental in the landmark court ruling that required historic changes to public education in Kentucky and resulted in the Kentucky Education Reform Act, or KERA.This fall, Moreland and the same group that helped bring about the reform, the Council for Better Education, are preparing for a fight in the courts or in the legislature as they once again work to get more money for elementary and secondary public schools.

The council is seeking nearly $900 million in state funds to provide an "adequate" education for every student in Kentucky, Moreland told a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce luncheon Friday at the Metropolitan Club. Moreland is now superintendent of the Covington schools.

Moreland wants to confer with top legislative leaders, including House Speaker Jody Richards, D-Bowling Green, and Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville. If the council can receive a firm commitment for more money from the legislature, a lawsuit may be averted.

But Moreland, a veteran of lobbying Frankfort on behalf of education, knows the political realities of dealing with the legislature.

"I'm going in optimistic," Moreland said, "but will probably come out realistic."

That means a lawsuit challenging state funding of schools could be filed by Labor Day, he said.

"We want to do this as a non-threatening thing," Moreland said. "There is no such thing as a friendly suit. We're very serious about what it is we are trying to do."

The council has beefed up its ranks with 165 of the state's 176 school districts on board. As he did during the original fight, Moreland is serving as president. The school districts are chipping in to pay for research and legal fees.

In 1984 Moreland was superintendent of the Dayton Independent School District in Campbell County. Dayton joined 65 mostly small districts from across Kentucky and in 1989 successfully sued the state over public education funding. Following the ruling, the legislature passed a $1.3 billion tax increase and implemented KERA and all its education reforms in 1990.

In their fight, the schools used wording in the Kentucky constitution that instructed the General Assembly to "provide for an efficient system of common schools."

"The word efficient ... is what really made the difference," Moreland said. "Because efficiency was determined in two different ways, one of which was equity. And that means that if you're a child in the absolutely poorest county in this commonwealth you deserve an equal opportunity to have a good education just like the child from the most affluent section of this commonwealth."

But after an initial increase, the percentage of money schools receive out of the general fund budget has actually decreased and when adjusted for inflation, base spending has increased just $19 per child over the last 13 years, Moreland said.

A University of Virginia study commissioned by Moreland's council determined that to achieve adequacy of education funding - including meeting certain levels of test scores - the state needs to spend an additional $892 million over the next 11 years.

Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce President Gary Toebben said putting more money into education is an investment the business community supports and the legislature needs to make.

"We know that this temporary high unemployment rate that we have today will be going down in the future," Toebben said. "And once again we're likely to have a scarcity of labor, especially skilled labor. And it all starts in those elementary and secondary years."

But Moreland and Toebben expressed concern that legislators may try to water down some of the accountability now built into student testing.

Moreland warned that "dumbing down" the tests would give taxpayers an inaccurate way to measure whether reforms are working. And Toebben said the tests are important to show improvement as well as the need for more investment in education.

"There's got to be a lot of that publicity about the testing and the results of the tests," Toebben said. "Otherwise the public will say 'I'm not sure we need to invest the kind of money that Jack Moreland was asking about.'"

E-mail pcrowley@enquirer.com