The move by LaHarpe parents asking USD 256 to bring buses into their town prompted USD 257 board members Monday night to discuss how best to keep students in Iola’s district.
Tony Leavitt, board president, spoke about a desire to work with other districts in the county to further the common agenda of providing the best education possible for students.
“We need to be thinking how our districts within the county can work closer together,” Leavitt said. “ What services could we share and what can we do differently to work together and maybe accomplish things better. I think we should stay within our existing boundaries and see what the other districts do. If something else happens then we may have to follow suit.”
Mark Burris, board member, said one of the reasons the board was discussing the issue in the first place was because of cuts to education encouraged by Gov. Sam Brownback.
“Under Gov. Brownback, and I’m not knockin’ him and I’m not praising him, changes are being made. They (Kansas legislators) are pushing the limits of the school districts. They are requiring at a local level for us to take more and more responsibility for educating our children and funding that. These are things that are going to continue to come up,” Burris said.
Burris also said decisions made now will have far-reaching impact.
“We can sit here and be bullheaded about it or we can embrace it and understand the change and use it to our advantage,” Burris said. “That’s going to keep our administrators employed, our teachers employed. So we can sit here and say let them come and let them take our people off the square. They can have a pickup at the Allen County courthouse and I don’t care where they take them but take them out of the district or we can make a change. I’m not saying go steal kids. I am saying we need to compete and our education system needs to be better than anything in the county for us to survive because that’s what it’s coming to.”
Scott Stanley, district transportation director, also chimed in wanting to know how far he could possibly go outside the district to pick up students who are already planning on coming to the district. In some cases that would mean going as much as a mile inside of a neighboring district. In another particular case Stanley talked about a child who literally lives on the boundary line between USD 479, based out of Colony, and Iola’s school district.
“We have a kindergarten student who lives 300 feet inside of Colony’s boarders,” Stanley said. “So we can pick up kids only on one side of the street if we keep with the district lines. If the child was older they could walk across the street and we could pick them up there but since they are that young we can’t do that. I’d like to know if we are allowed to pull into their driveway or not.”
Don Snavely, board member, expressed a need for a common sense approach on situations like that one.
“I think you work that stuff on an individual basis,” Snavely said. “I’d like to think everybody is going to be honorable so that we won’t have situations like that.”
Darrel Catron was pragmatic, pointing to the increased funding that districts like Colony and Moran get for each child. Right now an at-risk-student is worth $7,235 to USD 257. Due to the low attendance weighting given to smaller districts like Colony and Moran who stand to gain possibly $1,000 more in funding per student.
“When they start balancing their budget they’ll take the numbers, I guarantee you,” Catron said.
In the end, the board decided to remain within the borders and wait to see what happens next.
“I think the superintendents and school boards are in a wait-and-see mode,” Pekarek said.
