Tweet stirs up latest school funding spat

The clash over how to count teacher retirement payments in school funding flared Thursday when a Wichita school board member took to Twitter, asking how the district was supposed to help children with money that spent only one minute in its bank account.

“USD259 KPERS payment arrived today @ 7 am. Sent back at 7:01 am. How should we have invested in kids for that 1 min?” tweeted Lynn Rogers, a school board member who is running for a state Senate seat.

Gov. Sam Brownback was not amused when that question was relayed to him during a news conference touting a mentoring program for juvenile offenders.

“Maybe we can adjust it to a half an hour,” Brownback replied. “The Supreme Court said that us funding KPERS is part of school funding, so that’s how it’s funding for Wichita schools.”

How to count payments for KPERS – the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System – is at the heart of dueling claims over whether state funding has gone up or down for schools.

Brownback has touted record spending on schools, including KPERS money in his calculations, while school districts have contended that increased KPERS payments have masked cuts in school operating funds and forced classroom cutbacks.

Rogers’ presumed opponent in the Senate race, incumbent Michael O’Donnell, R-Wichita, said he thinks the KPERS spending is an investment in students because pension programs help keep teachers in the system.

“There’s no one I’ve ever spoken with that does not believe teacher salaries or retirement or benefits are a legitimate educational expense,” O’Donnell said.

Wichita is one of four districts that went to court challenging Brownback’s block grant funding plan for schools, passed by the Legislature earlier this year in a spending bill called House Substitute for Senate Bill 7. The block grant bill essentially holds school funding at 2014 levels for two years while the Legislature works to create a new school-finance formula.

A three-judge school-finance court ruled in June that SB 7 was unconstitutional in its handling of “equalization” funds, state money that boosts funding for property-tax-poor school districts so that children there have roughly the same educational opportunity as students in richer districts. And the court ruling specifically called out Brownback’s claim of increased school funding.

“House Substitute for Senate Bill 7, though promoted as a change and an improvement in K-12 funding, really encompasses … what is no more than a freeze on USD operational funding for two years,” the court wrote.

It went on to say that any purported increase comes “by way of adding in, under the guise of operational funds, Kansas Public Employees Retirement System employer contributions … to the ‘block’ of funds provided.”

That decision is on appeal to the state Supreme Court, with oral arguments scheduled in three weeks.

In the leadup to the court showdown, the governor and political surrogates from third-party groups have ramped up a campaign to portray schools as top-heavy institutions spending too much outside the classrooms and not enough in them.

Last week, former House Speaker Mike O’Neal, now president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, made that case to Wichita’s Republican Pachyderm Club.

In a 2014 ruling, the Supreme Court wrote that state KPERS contributions “may also be a valid consideration” in whether the state is meeting its constitutional obligation to provide suitable funding for schools, “because a stable retirement system is a factor in attracting and retaining quality educators – a key to providing an adequate education.”

In addition to citing that court ruling, Brownback challenged the school district to fund its own retirement plan if it doesn’t like what the state is doing.

“If the Wichita school district would like to fund its own pension system they can do that if they would like to,” he said. “I haven’t heard them saying that but if they would like to (they can).”

The latest estimate is that the state will provide about $353 million to educator pension funds this year, said Craig Neuenswander, school finance director at the state Education Department.

Wichita’s quarterly state KPERS payment Thursday was about $8.5 million. School employees contribute 6 percent of their salary to KPERS, up from 5 percent last year.

Rogers said taking over the pension system is not under consideration and he’s grateful the state funds the employer contribution to pensions. However, he said, he worries that may be reduced or eliminated if state income continues to slide.

The touch-and-go on school KPERS funding is “kind of the equivalent of money laundering to a degree,” Rogers said. “We’re not getting anything for it.

“… It’s just for appearance sake,” he said. “That’s plain and simple to confuse people and make them think they’re funding more for education – and they’re not. They’re doing what they were legally obligated to do before that.”

School retirement money used to go straight from the state to KPERS, but that changed in the 2004-2005 budget year, Neuenswander said.

At the time, lawmakers said they didn’t think they were getting enough credit for the money they were putting into education. Since then, they’ve added other spending lines that weren’t traditionally counted as school funding but are now.

This story was originally published October 15, 2015 at 7:44 PM with the headline "Tweet stirs up latest school funding spat."