Flying solo without Baltimore City at its side, the American Civil Liberties Union yesterday sued the state, charging that city schoolchildren are denied a decent education.
ACLU lawyers filed a class-action suit in Baltimore Circuit Court, naming as defendants the state Board of Education and several state officials. The suit asks the court to declare Maryland's method of financing schools unconstitutional because it deprives city students of the resources for an "adequate" education.
Baltimore also suing
Baltimore City is preparing a similar suit, but city officials were absent yesterday as the ACLU announced its litigation.
"The ACLU represents parents and students, and they are raising a lot of issues that are the same as ours," said Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke. "But they also may be raising some issues that we may not address in our suit. That's not a problem at all."
Lawyers expect the suits to be tried together.
"This suit is about how well Baltimore City students are doing," said Alan I. Baron, of the Washington firm of Howrey & Simon. "They're not doing very well by any number of indicators. Since education is the responsibility of the state, we are asking that the state be ordered to provide an adequate education for all city schoolchildren."
Mr. Baron, whose firm is doing the legal work on the suit for free, said the civil liberties group felt that it might have to argue that "at least part of the city's problem is that the resources the city does have available to it are not being managed effectively.
"We also felt that the city, as a political entity, has considerations in its relations with other political jurisdictions that we don't have. One of our luxuries is that we don't have to worry about politics."
Mr. Schmoke said the city suit would be filed by the end of the month. An item on today's Board of Estimates agenda is the hiring of a Silver Spring law firm, Alexander, Gebhardt, Aponte and Marks, to represent Baltimore in its litigation.
The 44-page ACLU suit, filed in the names of the parents of 19 children from 12 schools, relies heavily on the city's poor showing in the Maryland School Performance Program, a reform effort spearheaded by state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, one of the suit's defendants.
Baltimore met only two of the 25 state standards in last year's state report card. An updated report card is to be issued $H Monday.
The complaint cites low city test scores, poor attendance, the highest high school dropout rate in Maryland, low scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test taken for college entrance, high student-to-teacher ratios, poor school plants and insufficient supplies.
The state has a school-aid formula designed to pump more money into districts with poorer tax bases. For example, Baltimore received $2,325 in basic state aid per pupil in the last school year, compared with $1,489 in Anne Arundel County, $1,336 in Baltimore County and $1,330 in Howard County.
Aid called inadequate
Yet, according to the suit, the aid is insufficient in Baltimore, where many children are at greater risk of school failure because of poverty and other factors.
According to the suit, two-thirds of Baltimore students are eligible under federal poverty guidelines for free or reduced-price lunches. Meanwhile, the $5,182 the city spent on each student in 1992-1993 was 11 percent below the state average, according to the ACLU complaint.
Similar lawsuits have been won in other states, including Kentucky and Alabama.
Susan Goering, the ACLU Maryland legal director, said her organization had waited for five years to file the suit.
She said the ACLU decided to go to court after the recommendations of a statewide commission on school finance "got almost nowhere" in the 1994 General Assembly.
The ACLU attorneys took pains to distinguish their suit from a 1979 challenge to the state school aid formula filed by Baltimore and three rural districts.
That suit, won in Circuit Court but lost on appeal to the state Court of Appeals in 1983, concentrated more on the unequal resources between rich and poor districts.
"This isn't a replay of [the earlier suit]," said Mr. Baron, who lives in Baltimore.
"That suit was about input. This suit is about output. Good education is more than a question of money."
Parents' complaints
Two of the parents listed as plaintiffs in the suit attended yesterday's ACLU news conference.
Letty J. Herold, president of the PTA at Patterson High School, said her daughter "went through the entire ninth grade without a science textbook."
Her school, Mrs. Herold noted, has been "reconstituted" by the state Board of Education, "but if you think that's resulted in an influx of money, think again."
Roxanne Bartee-El, mother of three, described the deficiencies at John Eager Howard Elementary School, where she is a volunteer.
"By the time a majority of children get to the second grade," she said, "if they don't know their ups and downs, the colors, the basic things, they're lost."