By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Kansas Association of School Boards Vice President for Advocacy, Mark Tallman took a long look at where and what schools spent money on and if it appears to have helped.
"Our education outcomes at te top level have continued to go up," Tallman said. "That doesn't mean the same thing happens every year or all the time. One of the things we've tried to show in this is we had education increasing more than inflation for a period. This really looks at data from 1999 to last year. We had rising improvement through about 2009 in terms of funding. We then had a period where funding fell behind inflation until about 2017 and the last several years we've had more funding added in response to the Gannon case."
Of the just under $2 billion in additional school funding beyond inflation from 1999 to 2020, approximately 75 percent was for personnel.
"The legislature has added a lot of money to make up for past underfunding in the KPERS system," Tallman said. "We showed how districts have also, with the approval of local voters, added a lot of funding for school facilities. Interestingly enough, as we've spent the last several months debating the problems we've had keeping kids in school with the pandemic, it's really I think helped show how important having good school facilities really are and how much we miss them if we don't have them."
Higher construction costs based on 1999 spending accounted for 5 precent of the total and additional enhancements to school facilities the remaining 20 percent.