TOPEKA — Gov. Laura Kelly responded with contempt to a feeling of deja vu after the Kansas Senate voted to rely on federal COVID-19 funding rather than Kansas tax dollars to cover as much as $568 million in public education obligations in a proposed two-year state budget.
The Republican-controlled Senate wants to explore opportunities to earmark COVID-19 assistance to cover the state’s obligations to Kansas for public education, but not make a final decision until May. Passage of Senate Bill 267 signaled the Senate would delay final K-12 budget decisions a couple months to seek clarity on the state’s tax revenue picture and to await guidance from the federal government on spending pandemic aid funneled into the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund.
“If Senate Bill 267 becomes law it would cut funding for Kansas public schools by more than half a billion dollars,” Kelly said. “The last thing Kansas needs — just as our teachers are vaccinated and our kids are returning to in-person learning — is to sabotage our education system by subverting critical COVID recovery funds.”
Kelly, a Democrat, was serving in the Kansas Senate during a national recession more than a decade ago when temporary federal stimulus money was rolled into Kansas’ education budget to free state tax dollars for other purposes. The move offered immediate relief from budget pressures, but reliance on one-time money eventually meant the state faced a budgetary reckoning.
The Legislature dealt with its post-recession budget problems by abandoning school-funding promises and passing aggressive income tax cuts embraced by then-Gov. Sam Brownback. The inevitable lawsuit filed by public school districts led to intervention by the Kansas Supreme Court, which affirmed the Legislature’s constitutional duty to suitably finance K-12 public schools. The Supreme Court retained jurisdiction over the latest lawsuit in anticipation legislators might again fail to complete a muli-year plan to improve funding of public education. Much of the Brownback tax program was repealed in 2017.
“I promised when I became governor that Kansas would not make the mistakes of the past, and that we would fulfill our constitutional obligation to fully fund our public schools, and I will keep that promise,” Kelly said.
On Wednesday, the Senate voted 24-13 to send a two-year budget bill to the House. GOP senators defended the decision to shoehorn CARES Act money into the state’s K-12 budget — $236 million in the fiscal year starting July 1 and $332 million in the subsequent fiscal year.
Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, said objections to the Senate bill were a “red herring” and “scare tactic” because nothing about the state government’s budget had been set in stone. He said the Senate’s approach did have a “chicken-and-egg” feel, but did nothing to jeopardize K-12 aid designed specifically to address academic inequities across the state. The prudent decision is to wait for more information about appropriation of the COVID-19 relief targeting the nation’s schools, he said.
Masterson rejected a proposal by Democrats to put state general fund dollars into K-12 now and leave open the option of replacing that money with federal aid if permitted.
