Kansas public schools are the heart of our communities and towns. Public schools serve 90% of Kansas children.
Our elementary schools set the foundation for our children’s futures and our high schools bring us together for Friday night ball.
Once again in this legislative session, efforts are underway to erode trust in our educators and to shift the responsibility of K-12 education from taxpayers to parents.
This is one way to shrink the government, I suppose, at the expense of our children.
A variety of tax credit bills, which are a form of vouchers, are being proposed. These bills put pressure on the state budget. All are harmful to rural Kansas. One bill would add $125 million in new spending to pay for private school tuition, with no oversight, under the pretense of “helping poor kids get into better-performing schools.”
If you have private schools in your area, then you know these schools choose the family and child, not the other way around. Struggling, high-needs students need not apply.
In other states, 70% of the tuition breaks go to private school families who have never enrolled their children in public schools.
In Kansas, over 60 of the 105 counties have no private schools; most are located in the state’s urban areas.
In every state that voted to roll out voucher programs, the costs of K-12 education have exploded.
In Arizona, the voucher program cost upwards of $430 million in 2025, which was five times more than the projected costs.
In Iowa, private schools hiked tuition after voting in an Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program, keeping the non-public schools out of reach of low-income families.
Essentially, voucher states are paying for two K-12 education systems, shortchanging the schools that serve the majority of the school-age children and creating an unsustainable burden on the state budget.
What supporters of these plans don’t mention is that Kansas already has school choice.
The manufactured story that parents have no rights in our local public schools has been used to fuel distrust in our teachers, principals and district leaders and create a reason for vouchers through tax credits.
These very districts are run by locally elected school boards. Additionally, these districts are sometimes the largest employers in the area, and they employ some of the most dedicated people in your local communities.
