State panel OKs $366,000 for Wichita district to help refugee students

Gov. Sam Brownback and a council of legislative leaders approved $366,000 in aid for the Wichita school district Monday to help provide support to refugee students.

Two charities working with the federal government have placed students from Myanmar, Somalia, Rwanda and other war-torn countries in the district in recent years. These students often arrive not knowing how to speak English and suffering from emotional trauma.

The district had sought $980,000 in extraordinary need aid to help hire specialists capable of providing the students with language and emotional support.

“They’re going to be citizens of our country and we want them to be successful,” Diane Gjerstad, the district’s spokeswoman, told the State Finance Council.

The district had 132 refugees enrolled at the start of last school year, and that’s the number the state used when it calculated block grant funding for school districts.

Since then, another 92 refugee students have arrived, and Wichita officials estimate 145 more will come by the end of the school year.

The State Finance Council, chaired by Brownback, approved money only for the 92 students who had joined the district since last September.

After the meeting, Gjerstad said the district was grateful it would receive money for the students already with the district, which she said would go toward hiring new staff.

Sen. Ty Masterson, R-Andover, the Senate’s budget chair, said educating the refugee students should be the responsibility of the federal government and that the cost had been foisted on Kansas taxpayers without their knowledge.

House Speaker Ray Merrick, R-Stilwell, said he supported the extra funding reluctantly.

“When groups bring people or send people, the money ought to come with them,” Merrick said later. “You dump people on us and expect us to pick up the tab.”

The Kansas Department of Education did not apply for federal funding to assist in educating refugee students for this year and will be unable to do so now until next summer.

Brownback, who helped resettle Sudanese refugees in Kansas as a member of the U.S. Senate, said he wants to see more cooperation between the state and the federal government in placing refugees.

“I think they ought to work more with the states to get populations that fit in particular regions, because I think they exacerbate the problems,” Brownback said. “Having said that, the populations that come in have high needs.”

The council approved about $4 million in extraordinary need aid to 26 school districts Monday for a variety of reasons, such as enrollment increases and changes to property values that affected local tax revenue.

The extraordinary need fund was set up when lawmakers repealed the state’s school funding formula last session and replaced it with block grants.

The money comes from a small portion of each district’s budget and is meant to pay for unexpected cost increases. The fund has $2.9 million remaining for this fiscal year, according to the governor’s office.

Contributing: Associated Press

This story was originally published November 9, 2015 at 12:22 PM with the headline "State panel OKs $366,000 for Wichita district to help refugee students."