TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Kansas educators saw plenty of problems Thursday with a new school funding plan being considered by legislators, and a big one is what critics perceive as not enough new dollars.
A special state House committee opened hearings on a bill that would create a new per-student formula for distributing about $4.1 billion a year in aid to the state’s 286 local school districts. The new formula would increase the state’s annual spending by $75 million.
Republican lawmakers scrapped a per-student formula in 2015 in favor of stable “block grants” for districts. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that the law violated the state constitution and gave the GOP-controlled Legislature until June 30 to enact a new one.
The high court also said the state’s spending on public schools wasn’t sufficient for legislators to fulfill a duty under the state constitution to finance a suitable education for every child. Educators and state officials have been debating how big of an increase is necessary.
Mark Tallman, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said the necessary annual increase could be $779 million - more than 10 times as provided by the bill.
“I do believe they’re trying to buy a Cadillac with Volkswagen money,” Destry Brown, the superintendent in Pittsburg in southeastern Kansas, said after the hearing.
The discussion about school funding comes with Kansas facing projected budget shortfalls totaling more than $1 billion through June 2019. Legislators expect to raise taxes and many want to roll back past income tax cuts championed by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback.
The Senate Ways and Means Committee on Thursday endorsed proposed budgets for the fiscal year beginning in July and the one beginning in July 2018 that would require $874 million in new revenues from higher taxes over those two years. And the figure does not include new dollars for public schools.
State Department of Education figures show that under the House committee’s plan, 107 districts would see their general state aid decline, as funds migrate to other districts. Ten districts would lose more than 20 percent of their general aid, a majority of them with fewer than 100 students. The tiny Hamilton district in Greenwood County would lose 59 percent of its general aid.
Brown and other school superintendents who testified took issue with how the plan would distribute state aid for bilingual education, career training, busing students to school and programs that help students at risk of failing. They also said the formula could hurt both fast-growing districts and districts with declining student numbers.
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