By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Vice President for advocacy with the Kansas Association of School Boards notes that the Kansas Legislature is trying to get more oversight in exchange for its renewal of high-density at-risk funding this session.
"It's pretty clear that the Kansas Supreme Court would be concerned about anything that took money away," said Mark Tallman with KASB. "This is why I think the legislature is putting a little more focus around the idea of, we want to look at, kind of, what we're getting for those dollars. That's really the issue in the at-risk side. There continue to be concerns by some legislators that schools aren't spending money the right way."
School board members at the local level push back against this, because each district has its own unique needs and they consider those to be decisions they have been elected to make.
"We're not so much talking about amount of dollars right now as, either the strings you put on them, the accountability that you're wanting to have with that," Tallman said. "I might just quickly note that the actual school funding law is costing a little bit less than was expected, because school enrollment and those extra weighting factors that factor into the formula in certain cases didn't grow as much as expected."
There has been some consideration to shifting that appropriated but unspent money to a place like Special Education, but that comes with potential issues down the road if money gets tight again.
"The state has a goal of how much of Special Education they are supposed to fund," Tallman said. "They're not meeting that goal, but the Kansas Supreme Court did not fault the Legislature for that, as long as they were kind of treating everyone equally or equitably and as long as there's enough total money in the pot. One of the concerns by some legislators is, well, if we put this extra money in, then we have to keep putting that in because of what's called federal maintenance of effort, which basically means, once you get to a certain level of Special Education funding, if you pull back on your funding, the federal government pulls back on their funding."
It's also important to continue to make payments to the state retirement fund, KPERS, which teachers are a large part of, and the ongoing KPERS issue is always a political football in Topeka.