There is one very important reason to elect State Sen. Tom Holland of Baldwin for governor — he has pledged to keep the present formula for funding the public schools. That formula provides enough state aid to school districts such as those in Allen County and the rest of southeast Kansas to give them a chance to compete with those in rich counties like Johnson.
His competitor, Sam Brownback, has not. To the contrary, Sen. Brownback appears to be siding with Republicans in the state Legislature who want to reduce state aid to the schools and depend more on the property tax.
Make no mistake, the only way to “increase local control” of the schools is to increase local funding and decrease state aid. Any reduction of state aid almost certainly would impact property-poor districts such as USD 256, USD 257 and USD 258. Going back to the high property tax levies the districts were forced into before the school funding reforms of 1992 would do wide-range damage in every poor district in the state.
Allen County would be hit particularly hard. Doubling or tripling our property tax total would discourage local industries from expanding and could even tempt companies to pull up stakes and move. Housing would become more expensive, adding another impediment to the building of more affordable units.
Most important of all, shoving the burden back onto the shoulders of a dwindling number of property taxpayers in shrinking southeast Kansas would lead inevitably to lowering the quality of public education, all but assuring that our quarter of the state would continue to lose population and that its quality of life would sink.
COULD ONE man do that much damage, you wonder. No. He would need help. And Gov. Brownback would have all kinds of help from the Kansas House of Representatives, which is every bit as “conservative” as Mr. B. (Their brand of “conservatism” needs the quotation marks because its aim is to tear down, not to conserve, keep as is, or save). They are — and have every right to be in our system — determined to make Kansas government smaller, which is to say, less than it is.
Making state support of education smaller means spending less on teaching our children how to cope in an information-based world. Under their formula, what the state doesn’t give will be made up from local funds.
For as long as any parent with school-age children can remember, Kansas has had governors determined to keep public education strong and to equalize funding between rich and poor districts with state aid. Those governors have submitted budgets to the Legislatures which implemented those goals. They have fought for those budgets and used their powerful office to achieve them.
THIS IS THE stark either-or decision voters in this quarter of Kansas will make on Nov. 2. Vote for Tom Holland for better schools and for more equal funding between the rich and the poor school districts of the state. Vote for Sam Brownback and you will be voting for a return to sky-high school district levies that made this part of the state even more impoverished than it was and cheated the children of southeast Kansas of first class schools.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
