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TOPEKA – Gov. Sam Brownback’s school finance plan faces an uncertain future as lawmakers test out a variety of changes in hope of making it more palatable to fellow politicians and education officials.
Sen. Jean Schodorf, a Wichita Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said Tuesday that her committee won’t vote on the plan before a critical legislative deadline this Friday when most bills must be approved by the House or Senate.
Instead, she sought an extension and said she’s not sure what the plan’s prospects are.
“Anytime you have something as difficult as this it takes a lot of discussion,” she said.
The current school funding formula was enacted in 1992 and revised in 2005 and 2006 after the state Supreme Court ruled school funding was inadequate.
The governor’s plan allows school district voters to approve unlimited property tax increases to bolster local education and gives districts at least as much money as they currently receive, which critics say keeps funding artificially low because of recession-linked cuts in recent years.
It also replaces weightings that give districts with large populations of at-risk students more money with an equalization payment that some critics say doesn’t take into account how student populations change year to year.
“I think it’s a major change in the school funding formula and it takes people a while to get comfortable with changes of this magnitude,” said Sen. John Vratil, R-Leawood. “I think it has an uphill battle this year and it will probably need to be reintroduced next year.”
The governor’s office offered this response via spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag: "The governor appreciates the legislature's interest in and work on improving education in Kansas and we look forward to continuing to work them on these topics as the session continues."
The bill’s future in the House could be tenuous as well.
“If the Senate is having trouble getting together in smaller numbers and finding something that could be supported by a majority over there, I think it would be difficult for the House to be able to move something,” said House Education Committee Chairman Rep. Clay Aurand, R-Belleville.
But senators are hauling stacks of amendments forward in hopes of finding consensus.
Sen. Allen Schmidt, D-Hays, said some of those changes seem to steer the proposal back toward the current formula, which Democrats say simply needs to be fully funded.
“It just appears we’re spinning our wheels here trying to find all the ways out, minus a few, to get back to where we started,” he said.
Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, sought to sweeten the plan for districts, including Wichita, that would receive the exact amount they got this year. Her proposal, which hasn’t been voted on yet, would multiply the amount some districts get to equalize their funding by 5 percent next year. That would add $3.6 million for Wichita.
“I tried to give them a predictable amount of money for four years that they could bank on,” she said.
Her proposal, along with others that aim to make the plan more attractive to various districts and interest groups, was not voted on and will have to wait until at least next week for further discussion.
Wagle said she believes the plan could still be approved by lawmakers – it just may take more time.
“The current formula is broken, and we’re in court,” she said. “It’s extremely complicated, it has numerous weightings and I think the governor was trying to simplify funding and get us out of court.”
Meanwhile, the House Education Committee advanced a bill Tuesday that changes how districts handle teacher evaluations.
Lawmakers stripped many controversial measures presented by Brownback’s administration, including a proposal to put evaluation results on publicly visible websites.
Under the proposal, the State Board of Education would help set up criteria to evaluate teachers, with an emphasis on the growth of achievement. That would be administered through a new system educators have been working on for years called the Kansas educator evaluation protocol – or KEEP.
Aurand said the move provides uniformity across the state and empowers the board of education to set up criteria for evaluations without micromanaging.
Rep. Ed Trimmer, D-Winfield, saw it differently.
“I don’t think it does much of anything,” he said.
