A phony issue has been injected into the race between Jana Shaver of Independence and Robert Medford of Pittsburg for the District Nine seat on the State Board of Education.
Shaver is the incumbent. Medford accuses her and the rest of the board of a failure to step in and tell school districts how to spend their money, suggesting in his campaign rhetoric that the state board would be able to save Kansas taxpayers a ton of money if it would examine each district’s budget and tell the boards how to cut costs.
Specifically, he criticizes the amount of money the 293 districts hold in reserve in their capital outlay accounts “in case a boiler explodes.”
Shaver respondes to Medford by reminding him that the school districts are already being required to do more with less because state aid was slashed by the Legislature to deal with the fiscal crisis caused by the recession.
She also rightly said, “we are a local control state. That’s something we have supported. Every district is different. They know their needs, their community. They are best qualified to make decisions on spending.”
SHE COULD have added that the Board of Education doesn’t mess with the spending decisions in the 293 districts because it doesn’t have the power to do so.
When the State Board rears back and issues a statement saying that public funding of the schools should be increased by millions of dollars to a specific level, as it has done many times in the past, nothing happens. Nothing happens because the power to spend state money lies with the Legislature, not the Board of Education.
The Legislature sends the money it appropriates for public education straight to the school
districts, where it is spent according to state law at the direction of the locally elected school boards who, with the advice of the superintendents of schools, decide how the dollars will be spent. The dollars involved don’t stop at the State Board of Education anywhere along the line.
Dr. Medford is perfectly aware of all of this. The 77-year-old spent his working life in the education field. He worked for the National Education Association — the teachers’ union — for 22 years, helping teachers win higher wages in negotioations. He doubtless could give a very learned lecture on the way the schools in Kansas are financed.
It is ironic, come to think of it, that he is now making his pitch for election to the state board with a pledge to try to cut spending at the local level — the very level where teacher salaries and benefits are decided. Politics sometimes changes values.
District Nine teachers needn’t worry. They are very well represented by Ms. Shaver, who also spent her career before politics as a teacher, and who will continue to serve educators and the Kansas public well by focusing on improving the quality of education in the public schools and leaving school financing to the Legislature and school budgets to the 293 districts boards where it is and should remain.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
