Kansas Republicans push for massive school voucher tax credits. What about the budget? | Opinion

A decade ago, then-Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback blew up the state budget and hurt public schools as a result.

His “tax experiment” is rightly remembered as a colossal failure. Voters hated it.

Maybe that’s why his fellow Kansas Republicans are trying something different in 2025: They want to undermine the state’s public schools in a different way that also could blow up the state budget.

My guess? They’ll still get lousy results.

An explanation is needed. The Kansas Senate Education Committee on Tuesday heard testimony on Senate Bill 75, a so-called “voucher” bill that provides massive tax credits to families that keep their kids out of public schools and send them to private schools instead.

Parents who send a child to an accredited private school would get an $8,000 credit. (If you have three kids and use the credit, you’d get $24,000 back.) If they send their kid to an unaccredited private school, they would get $4,000.

That’s a lot of money.

So much, in fact, that opponents of the bill say some families could actually earn some extra cash merely by sending their children to private schools.

Which sure seems like an unwise use of taxpayer money.

“I worry we’re incentivizing families to turn a private expense into income,” Hilary Junk of Lenexa, an opponent of the bill, told the committee.

The budgets for Kansas public schools are based on the number of students they enroll. Every kid that leaves for a private school takes money out of the system — a base rate of $5,378 per student in 2024-25 — weakening the public schools that serve as the hubs of their communities and neighborhoods.

GOP eyes property, income tax cuts

That’s bad for the schools, obviously. But S.B. 75 is also bad for the state’s overall budget.

Why? Because the bill allocates $125 million a year to the voucher budget. And it includes a mechanism that can inflate that number quickly — every year that 90% of the budget is used, it automatically increases by 25% the next year.

There are more than 40,000 Kansas students attending private schools. The math adds up pretty quickly.

“You could very easily be up to $225 million in four years,” former Lt. Gov. Lynn Rogers, now representing the Kansas Interfaith Action Network, told the committee. “That will blow a hole in the budget.”

That seems like an almost-certain result.

In Arizona, a universal voucher law has blown a “massive hole” in that state’s budget, ProPublica reported in July — growing in just a few years from $65 million to roughly $332 million and beyond.

Republicans in Topeka are eager to cut property taxes and possibly even income taxes this year. Creating a massive new entitlement at the same time seems like a good way to create fiscal trouble pretty soon down the road.

The spirit of Sam Brownback still lives.

‘Heart of Kansas communities’

Kansas Republicans have failed repeatedly to pass a voucher bill in recent years. Their newly strengthened supermajorities in both houses of the legislature give them a real chance to get over the hump this year.

And if not this year, possibly sometime soon.

“Kansas one day will have school choice,” said John Walker, superintendent of Central Christian School in Hutchinson. All states will, he said. “It is my hope and my prayer that we will not be No. 50.”

There was a lot of passion on both sides of the packed, whirlwind debate on Tuesday. And let’s be clear about this: The debate — mostly between public school advocates and Christian school officials and students — is not a case of good guys versus bad guys.

Both sides seem to want what’s best for kids. They just disagree on how to get there.

But that doesn’t make S.B. 75 a good bill. Public schools are, as one opponent said, the “heart of Kansas communities.” Private school vouchers would weaken that heart. And probably put the state on shaky fiscal footing, to boot. It’s hard to see the upside.

This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 5:06 AM with the headline "Kansas Republicans push for massive school voucher tax credits. What about the budget? | Opinion."