Local school districts are left to bear the entire burden of paying for 96% of the students with special education needs. For example, Claremont spends between $1.2 to $1.5 million on special education per school year. Catastrophic Aid reimburses only $50,000 to $100,000 of those expenses.

Even when a student is eligible for Catastrophic Aid, the district is not reimbursed by the state until the following year. The state's withholding of payments for a year does not help school districts reduce their large Special Education deficits, which often leads to freezes in other areas of their budgets.

The Superior Court heard testimony that often a student who requires Special Education services moves into a district after the budget is finalized. The budget will not include funds for that student. Such Special Education cost overruns also often result in a petitioner school district's budget being frozen by mid-year. When districts try to budget for Special Education cost overruns, they tie up already scarce funds.

Table 14 - District Budgets for 1993/94

Table 14 purported to show what percentages of the petitioner and comparison school districts' budgets were derived from; Local Revenues, Revenue Sharing, Foundation Aid and Other Revenues.

The Superior Court used Table 14 to erroneously conclude that, in 1994, petitioner school districts funded only between 55 and 68 percent of their budget with local property taxes. The Superior Court stated that the state aid that the petitioner school districts received was much larger than the state average of 8%.

Evidence was provided to the Superior Court that the figures in Table 14 were created by Dr. Snow and do not accurately reflect the actual amount of state aid the school districts received or the amount of revenue they generated from their property taxes.

Dr. Snow testified that he purposely did not use the official figures available from Department of Education and Department of Revenue Administration documents. Instead, he either invented or recalculated the figures so that they grossly understated the amount of money raised by the school districts while also overstating the amount of money received by the districts from state Revenue Sharing.

Dr. Snow testified that the Revenue Sharing numbers he invented for Table 14, inflated the amount that petitioners school districts received. As an example, Dr. Snow reported that Claremont received $571,042 in Revenue Sharing. The correct figure was $409,317, a $161,725 misstatement by Dr. Snow.

State statute requires that all school districts file MS-25 Reporting Forms with the state Department of Revenue Administration; which report the amount of local revenues raised from school property taxes. Dr. Snow ignored the MS-25's. Instead he invented the numbers to calculate local revenues in Table 14 calling them the "property ownership tax."

During cross examination, Dr. Snow testified that the figures he calculated in the table entitled "Revenues Raised from Property Ownership Taxes for Schools" were less than the numbers contained in the school districts' MS - 25 Forms by the following amounts: