NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Kansas House is due on Tuesday to vote on Special Education funding along with K-12 funding and policy issues.
"There is a bill that will be voted on, on the House floor, it's House Substitute for Senate Bill 387, and it's a bill that combines K-12 funding for the general classroom, as well as $77 million in Special Ed funding as well. Unfortunately, it also contains some negative elements that KASB is opposing," said Leah Fliter with the Kansas Association of School Boards. "It counts local property tax dollars as state Special Education funding. It's basically the legislature attempting to say, we know there is a $400 million statewide shortfall for special education funding. We're just going to count some of your local tax dollars and pretend that's state aid and we're just going to call the problem fixed."
Nickerson-South Hutchinson USD 309 Superintendent Curtis Nightingale said every district is impacted, but it's still significant for his district.
"The tricky accounting has really been frustrating," Nightingale said. "Just our district alone, as small as our district is, we're underfunded in Special Ed by $300,000. What that means is, for every dollar we're underfunded by the state, we've got to pull that from our general fund, which means we take that out of where we would have paid salaries, or for any other programming we do in the buildings. We've got to reallocate that money to cover the underpayment that we receive from the state each year."
Nightingale did not mince words in how he believes some members of the legislature look at K-12 education.
"Education, for some of those legislators, has become an entitlement," Nightingale said. "They see that as dollars wasted. That's why you hear a lot of this verbiage about return on investment. They want to treat education like a business, in the fact that, we put this money in, we're not getting the money back out of it, kind of a thing."
On the Senate side, the special ed and K-12 pieces are not fused together, so there is still some hope that changes might be made in a conference committee and there is also the possibility that Gov. Kelly could veto portions of the bill through the line-item veto process.
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