I believe the Court focused on ''duty''; since the Legislature had already taken upon itself to set standards and mandates prior to the 1982 adoption of Part First Article 28-a
The Legislature created the State Board of Education in 1919, and empowered it with the ''management and supervision of all public schools''
The adoption of Article 28-a in 1982 only grandfathered programs that were not changed in any way.
There is no educational mandate that has not come after or been modified since that time.
Part First Article 28-a was add just after Governor Thomson. His ''Low spending'' was to move it off the State budget and place it locally; and that wasn't just education. Before the adoption of that article, doing so was completely constitutional. Had it been taken the ''Low spending'' comes from not mandating programs, Article 28-a would not exist today.
This last round had a lot of Article 28-a in it. Edelblut argued that though the State mandated - and did not pay for several things - he felt that those were not within the adequate education definition. I think the judge was amazed that our Education Commissioner had no clue that a mandate had to be paid for regardless of how it is ''defined''.
They got themselves caught on capping the grants by arguing that no inflation had occurred - seems the lawyer had a bad habit of screaming about the ''Biden Inflation'' on Facebook... and then making a statement that no inflation had occurred.
Then they got caught trying to explain how any of the State taxation is not redistributed with some donor towns and some receiver towns. I seem to remember reading the transcript asking if the money from business in a certain town are only return to that town rather than distributed to other towns.
By the way, that was a suggestion that I placed into effect. State Senator Gallus took it up before the study committee determined the north country would see a strong drop in their share of the proceeds.
The size of our State government is directly relate to the legislators... even now the LSRs have a whole bunch of mandates and modifications they want to make on education and other factors.
Somehow I doubt they will come to the conclusion to just simplify the mandates. Just like the local boards add the ''extras'' because of emotion, the Legislature is not immune.
How they raise the money - even though the same overall amount will actually be spent - will be interesting.
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