After a lengthy tutorial on the state of school finance, including charts and graphs, USD 257 board members approved a $22 million budget for the 2016-17 school year at their meeting Monday night, which keeps funding about on par with the previous year.
“There’s very little wiggle room,” said Jack Koehn, superintendent of schools, in the lengthy discussion on the budget.
Koehn walked board members through the district’s various funding mechanisms including mill levies and general state aid, and how they have changed according to the whims of state legislators.
Longtime board member Buck Quincy credited Koehn on the in-depth lesson.
“That’s the best budget report I’ve ever heard,” he said.
On paper, the budget is about $2 million less than last year’s due to a “different set of rules mandated by Topeka,” Koehn said. “It’s all a shell game.”
About 80 percent of the budget is allocated toward salaries; another 10 percent is a “pass-through” to KPERS, the state’s retirement program, and special education. “We don’t touch that money, it just blows through,” the district’s coffers onto the state’s general ledger, Koehn said.
Koehn reminded board members that funding for public schools is still “frozen” at a set amount determined by legislators in 2015.
“Hopefully, with next year’s Legislature we’ll return to funding schools determined by the number of students enrolled and their needs,” he said, referring to the state’s long-held method of funding K-12 schools. In 2014, legislators voted to reduce funding to schools and then freeze those cuts in what they termed block grant funding.
Koehn took particular issue with how districts like USD 257 are challenged to raise adequate funds through mill levies waged on local property owners.
What a mill rate yields is calculated on an area’s property values. For the local district, a 20-mill levy generates $872,203 for its general fund. The mill levy for its local options budget, another arm of the general fund, raises $889,010.
In Johnson County, where property values are high, the same mill levy yields almost $53 million for the Blue Valley school district.
“That’s why equalization is so important in school finance,” Koehn said.
A public hearing will be held at 6 p.m. Aug. 22 on the budget before it can be officially submitted to state officials.
