TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Kansas lawmakers are moving back toward distributing state dollars to public schools through a complicated per-student formula like one derided and scrapped by a more conservative Legislature only two years ago.
A special House committee outlined an education funding plan Tuesday that would use basic concepts from the state’s previous formula. The panel plans to have hearings on its bill Thursday and Friday.
The Kansas Supreme Court earlier this month ordered legislators to enact a new education funding law by June 30. The justices said the state isn’t spending enough money to finance a suitable education for every child, particularly poor and minority students who aren’t reading or doing math at their grade levels.
Republican lawmakers repealed the state’s previous funding formula in 2015 in favor of stable “block grants” for districts. GOP Gov. Sam Brownback and fellow conservatives complained that the old formula was too complicated and didn’t direct enough dollars into classrooms, while educators argued that it was sound.
The House committee’s proposal would set a basic aid amount for each student and add extra funding for students with special needs, as the pre-2015 formula did. Also like the old law, districts would get extra money for some of the students they bus to school and poorer districts would get help paying for new buildings or equipment.
“Personally, I never thought the old formula was bad,” said Republican state Rep. Clay Aurand of Belleville. “Some of the concerns some people had about it being complicated, I didn’t think it was that complicated.”
The 2015 law also made the state’s costs more predictable as it struggled to balance its budget after Brownback pushed GOP lawmakers to slash income taxes in 2012 and 2013. Voters last year ousted two dozen of Brownback’s allies from the Legislature, and lawmakers are considering rolling back past tax cuts he championed.
The Kansas Department of Education expects to have estimates Wednesday on how much additional spending the House committee’s plan would require and details about how it would affect each district. The state now spends nearly $4.1 billion a year on aid to its schools.
The plan’s drafters assumed basic aid from the state would be $4,170 per student to keep spending roughly the same as now. They intend the amount to grow each year by the rate of inflation.
But state aid would cover 80 percent of districts’ operating costs, and they would be required to impose local property taxes for the rest, assumed to be $1,042 per student. Districts could raise additional dollars for classrooms or student activities such as sports.
Some legislators and lobbyists for individual school districts said it’s hard to determine how well schools would fare without a final figure for aid per student. They also had qualms about mandating local property taxes and limits on how districts could use some funds.
And Rep. Jene Vickrey, a Louisburg Republican who supported the 2015 school funding law, said: “It’s our goal to make it simple, but I don’t know that we can get there.”
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