TOPEKA — The school funding bill forwarded by the Kansas Legislature to Gov. Laura Kelly — noteworthy for what it excluded as well as what it included — contained an unexpected budget twist that potentially blindsided as many as 100 public school districts with declining enrollment.
Kansas Department of Education officials tunneling into details of Senate Bill 113, which officially landed Monday on Kelly’s desk, said the revised formula for how student enrollment was used to determine a district’s basic funding would be detrimental to more than one-third of the state’s public school districts. The policy was altered at close of the 2023 session without typical public hearings, debates or explanations.
Currently, Kansas public school districts have the option of relying on student headcount from the prior year or second preceding year when calculating foundational state aid. Under the bill passed on the session’s final day April 28, districts would be restricted to using the current year or prior year’s enrollment for determining funding from the state. Enrollment would be multiplied by base aid per pupil of $5,088 a year.
This change would be a financial bonus to districts with growing student populations. It amounted to a loss for districts experiencing year after year of falling enrollment. Inability to rely on the second prior year to calculate state funding would harm budgets of an estimated 100 school districts. The most severely damaged would be districts in rural parts of the state, said Randy Watson, commissioner at the state Department of Education.
“You have a handful of districts that are growing. You have a lot of others that are declining,” Watson said in a Tuesday interview. “What I think is panicking them is that it happened so late and they already went through their budget process as if they had it and now they don’t. Some of our smallest rural communities, they’re losing a lot of money.”
The surprise losses in dozens of low-enrollment districts could range from $100,000 to $400,000 or more in the upcoming school year, he said.
The bill passed the Kansas Senate on a vote of 23-16 and in the House by a margin of 83-37 with large GOP majorities and a sprinkling of Democratic support. The governor, after receiving a bill, has 10 days to sign or veto the legislation, or allow it to become state law without a signature. The measure passed both chambers with less than two-thirds majorities necessary to override a veto.
Complicating this K-12 budgeting issue were decisions by House and Senate GOP leadership to adjourn “sine die,” which meant lawmakers would skip the traditional one-day ceremonial conclusion of the annual session. The maneuver eliminated a window of opportunity for the Legislature to consider overriding a school-funding bill veto by Kelly or to draft an alternative education appropriations bill.
If the governor vetoed Senate Bill 113, a special session of the Legislature would have to be called to address state spending for benefit of 500,000 students in the 2023-2024 academic year.
Melanie Haas, chair of the Kansas State Board of Education, said the Legislature complicated their work by pulling together the school funding bill in the hurly-burly closing hours of the session. Key decisions were made in a conference committee meeting of three senators and three representatives who sat down at a statehouse table to craft a deal. The 125 representatives and 40 senators, not participants in that dialogue, couldn’t amend the bundled bill.
