When new Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback presented his 2012 budget for the state earlier this month he said, “…State funding for school districts will increase $129.3 million in FY 2012. …. From a school district’s perspective, total state spending per pupil … increases from $4,549 in FY 2011 to $4,743 in FY 2012.”
I recall listening to that promise with great relief. Wonderful, I said to Susan, the governor really does understand how important education is to creating jobs and securing the future for Kansas kids.
Wrong! How very, very wrong.
What the budget actually proposes is still another sizeable drop in state aid for each child to $3,780 for the fiscal year that begins in July. The additional money “for education” will be spent on the school portion of KPERS (the state employees retirement program), special education and debt payments on capital projects.
As Sen. John Vratil wrote in his Capital Comments column last week, “To compare state aid per pupil to total per pupil spending on education is like comparing oranges to grapefruit.”
Sen. Vratil is too kind.
Surely Gov. Brownback knew that the phrasing he chose would mislead most Kansans and persuade them, as it did us, that he had found a way to keep school funding level or even lift it a tad. To discover that his budget really brings state aid down to years-ago levels is a double disappointment: first, that school districts in property-poor districts such as ours will be forced into spending cuts that will hurt both faculty and the students; second, that Gov. Brownback tried to paper the truth over with misleading rhetoric.
KANSAS LAWMAKERS don’t have to roll over and play dead for the governor. They can decide to do what’s right, instead, and raise more money for the state’s public schools; for the state’s coming crop of workers, investors, business leaders, parents and, yes, voters.
They can start by eliminating a slew of the exemptions to the sales tax, the property tax and the income tax. They can follow up with a study of the state’s tax structure to see where it might be strengthened to produce the income Kansas needs to meet its obligations to Kansas youngsters — the kids who will become the people of Kansas as they begin the state’s next 150 years.
And if reasonable legislation to save Kansas schools is vetoed and dies, then the governor will deserve all of the blame for rubbing the faces of Kansas kids in the dirt.
Kansas is a strong state with a growing economy. It doesn’t need, and surely doesn’t deserve, a poor-boy state government.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
