Jack Koehn, Iola’s superintendent of schools, is of a superstitious nature.
It’s a good sign, he says, that the upcoming special session of the Kansas Legislature will begin on a Thursday.
“They’ll have it done by 5 p.m. Friday,” was his prediction for USD 257 board members at their meeting Monday night.
Then his confidence wavered, ever so slightly.
“They won’t want to work over the weekend, right?” he asked rhetorically.
“You’re awfully optimistic,” replied Tony Leavitt, board president.
At stake is whether Kansas’s schools will remain open because of legislators’ failure to meet the state constitution’s directive that they be funded adequately and fairly.
“There’s already been some activity,” on coming up with possible solutions, Koehn said, referring to conversations he’s had with those who work at the Department of Education.
Koehn said there are “two flavors” of likely outcomes. The first, and in Koehn’s opinion most likely, is to return to the “old” formula by using as criteria a district’s demographics, its number of students, including if they have special needs.
“That’s already been approved by the Court,” Koehn said of the base state aid per student formula enacted in 1992. All that needs be done is to give it adequate funds.
The second alternative is to add the stipulation “hold harmless” to the old formula. When legislators tried that in 2015 they ran afoul of the Kansas Supreme Court and instead implemented the two-year block funding, which froze funding — after significant cuts were made.
The hold harmless method was intended to ensure no districts lost current funding.
Trouble is, in a state with such disparate regions, a blanket funding method affects poorer districts differently from those with higher property values.
“Similar tax efforts don’t come out equally,” Koehn said.
Under the old formula, USD 257 would be a “winner” of about $70,000 in the form of tax relief, Koehn said. “But there would also be some significant losers, even in Allen County, because of the new pipeline. And that would be in real money.”
Humboldt’s school district saw a big boost in funding when the construction of the Enbridge Pipeline increased its assessed valuation of property.
