Kansas school districts are trying to budget for some pretty big unknowns right now.
No one knows if it will even be safe to have students in schools in August, and everyone’s worried about the $650 million hole COVID-19 blew in the state’s budget. Administrators are worried that if the state’s economy doesn’t rebound soon, they’ll have to make deep cuts in the middle of next school year.
“There’s not a superintendent that isn’t preparing for something like that,” said Glen Suppes, the superintendent of the Smoky Valley Public Schools in Lindsborg. “We continue to hear optimism from (state education) Commissioner Randy Watson, and that schools are a priority for the governor.
“But I’m anxious to see how tax revenues are going to come in.”
The fiscal year 2021 budget that Kansas lawmakers passed in March, before the pandemic hit, looked pretty good for public education. K-12 schools got an additional $120 million, money the state’s high court has said needs to be spent on schools following a years-long funding battle.
“The problem is that budget, when it was passed, was based on numbers last November that have dramatically changed,” said Mark Tallman with the Kansas Association of School Boards.
Because of the pandemic, Kansas is facing a huge budget shortfall. In an April 20 memo, the Kansas Legislative Research Department forecasted an 8% overall decline in revenue for the coming fiscal year.
Tallman said in a state that spends more than half its revenue on education, there’s no way cuts won’t touch K-12 schools.
“There are certainly things the governor and legislature could do, but all of those are kind of bad choices. In a simple world, if you just … cut 8% out of the budget, you’re taking very major cuts,” Tallman said.
In a big district like Shawnee Mission in Johnson County, an 8% cut would be the difference between ending the school year with a $7 million surplus — and a $13 million deficit.
And that’s before factoring in raises, which are top-of-mind in Shawnee Mission after a protracted contract dispute with the teachers union that dragged on for most of the school year that just ended.
“I guess I’m one of those that’s really concerned about the revenue,” board member Brad Stratton said during a budget workshop last week.
Stratton, who was first elected to the school board in 2015, wants to budget cautiously for the upcoming school year because he knows what happens when revenue collections fall short: Education pays the price.
“KSDE (the Kansas Department of Education) is presenting one number, and then there’s the reality our legislators and governor are going to have to face,” Stratton said.
Until lawmakers tell the state Department of Education otherwise, though, schools are stuck with the optimistic, pre-pandemic numbers.
But Kansas school superintendents can’t afford to be quite so optimistic. Suppes, the Smoky Valley superintendent, needs to make decisions about staffing now before the fiscal year resets July 1.
