Back to the future? Kansas lawmakers risk reopening school funding lawsuit
Kansas lawmakers spent too much time this year debating a long list of unnecessary and provocative proposals, including banning transgender student athletes and making it harder to vote.
Yet the Legislature has failed to pass a school funding bill, which could cause major legal and budgetary headaches for public school districts across the state.
Nothing is more important than stability and predictability in public education. Kansas lawmakers must pass a clean, fully-funded education bill in the next two weeks, and Gov. Laura Kelly should sign it.
Anything less threatens to reignite the still-smoldering legal battle over school finance known as the Gannon case. “We retain jurisdiction to ensure continued implementation of the scheduled funding,” the Kansas Supreme Court said two years ago.
Nothing could be more clear. And nothing could be more harmful to students than plunging the state back into a messy court fight over school spending.
The Legislature made a run at passing a school funding bill in the final days of the regular session. While the measure spent $5.2 billion on public schools, as Kelly recommended, it also set up a complicated mechanism allowing some students to seek private school tuition reimbursement, potentially diverting public money into private schools.
Supporters said the funds would be an “investment” in education for under-performing students.
But at-risk students are failing largely because Kansas spent years underfunding public education. They needed to do that to balance budgets devastated by former Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cut experiment. Those students were in the early primary grades when the state’s per-pupil spending plummeted.
Kansas, prompted by decisions reached in the Gannon lawsuit, is just now restoring those funds to public schools. It will take time for that money to reach students whose education was crippled by the short-sightedness of Brownback and his fellow travelers in Topeka.
And there’s a more fundamental issue at stake. If public school students are struggling, the proper response is to fix the public schools. The worst answer is to take money from public schools and turn it over to private institutions less answerable to the people.
Legislators have also argued that public schools are receiving millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief money from Washington, D.C., making statewide funding less necessary. That’s a scary idea. The federal funds are meant to supplement state and local school spending, not replace it.
Nine courageous state Senate Republicans joined with 11 Democrats in early April to block the school funding bill. It failed on a 20-20 vote. Opponents said then the measure was too complicated, and the issue too important, to become law without a full discussion in Topeka.
They were right. To that, we would add: Anything that threatens full funding for public schools would drag the state back into court for a yearslong argument no one wants.
The solution is obvious. Lawmakers should pass a clean school funding bill, at the $5.2 billion level recommended by the governor. Any talk of private school tuition reimbursement or a voucher system should be dropped.
Public school students, teachers and parents have worked through a nightmare over the past 12 months — masks, remote learning, missed classes, fear. To their enormous credit, students and teachers have done the best they could during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It would be a disaster for legislators to threaten that limited success by diverting money away from classrooms for political purposes. A clean school funding bill is essential, and should pass before lawmakers adjourn for good.
