School task force leader says list is recommendations, not proposals

The chairman of the commission on school spending says a list of recommendations that he drafted, which has been circulating, does not represent the group’s actual policy proposals that will be submitted to the Legislature.

The K-12 Student Performance and Efficiency Commission was created by the school finance bill – passed this past session – for the purpose of studying ways that state dollars can be spent more effectively to produce the best outcomes for students.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reported Tuesday that Sam Williams, the Wichita businessman who chairs the commission, sent other members a draft of recommendations. The list includes creating incentives for rural school districts to consolidate and revising the rules for teacher contract negotiations.

Williams told The Eagle, which obtained a copy of the document, that it’s actually a list of recommendations made to the commission, not what it plans to recommend.

“Ninety-nine percent of that is a compendium of what was recommended to us,” Williams said. He listed the various organizations that testified before the commission, including the Kansas Association of School Boards.

“What I did was put them into a document that was called recommendations and those recommendations are the ones that were made to us by third parties,” he said. “And now our role is to go through and see which of these would we propose taking and making part of our recommendations.”

The 12-page document is titled “Legislative Recommendations” and includes this sentence on the first page: “The K-12 Student Performance and Efficiency Commission … makes the following recommendations for legislation.”

Many people read the document as a draft of what the commission will propose to the Legislature, including Mark Desetti, the legislative director for the Kansas National Education Association. He blasted the part of the document that dealt with making changes to teacher contracts.

“That section is clearly an attack on teachers and trying to destroy what’s left of the rights they have and voice they have in their profession,” Desetti said.

The recommendations on teacher negotiations come straight from the Governor’s School Efficiency Task Force in 2013, which is noted in the document, and include replacing the current salary schedule for public school teachers and narrowing the number of negotiable items in contracts.

Williams said the KNEA, the state’s largest teachers union, did not make any recommendations to the commission in its testimony.

“We were not asked to give recommendations,” Desetti said. “We were asked to share with them what we thought they should keep in mind as they deliberated.

“We talked about the rapidly expanding demands on the schools and what they expect teachers to do. We talked … (about) the positions that had been cut in support personnel.”

The commission’s recommendations also include incentives for consolidating rural school districts with low enrollment numbers.

“Continue and consider enhancing the incentives for school district cooperation AND consolidation,” the document says. Williams said this language is taken from the Kansas Association of School Boards and that the commission has not yet decided what it would do in regards to consolidation.

Gov. Sam Brownback has tried to make forced consolidation an issue on the campaign trail. He accused former Sen. John Vratil, who was appointed by Brownback’s opponent, House Minority Leader Paul Davis, of favoring consolidation.

“You know the governor, that little thing at the State Fair, caused a little bit of a ruckus,” Williams said. “But he’s running a campaign, I understand that, but so far we’ve not recommended anything.”

The commission will meet Thursday and Friday. Its final list of recommendations will go to the Legislature in January.

The governor’s office announced Wednesday that Dennis Depew, a Neodesha attorney who previously served as president of KASB, would take a spot on the commission to replace Meg Wilson, a principal from Hoisington. Wilson resigned this week, citing work obligations.

This story was originally published September 17, 2014 at 12:09 PM with the headline "School task force leader says list is recommendations, not proposals."