It’s now clear Kansas lawmakers want to get out of the business of public education.
As discussed at Monday night’s local school board meeting, House Bill 2741 “totally changes the landscape of education,” said Jack Koehn, USD 257 superintendent of schools.
The new legislation drastically cuts every district’s budget including funds to purchase educational materials, eliminates funding for all extra-curricular activities, requires teachers and staff to have the highest-deductible insurance plans, putting more of their health-care costs on them, and severely restricts any funds for building maintenance or construction.
Certainly, if parents of young children were not anxious before about the future of their children’s education, they should be now.
So how, exactly, are our children to be educated?
That’s a question legislators would rather you didn’t ask, but in essence, they’re making local districts do more of the heavy lifting by putting more of the funding on the backs of their local taxpayers.
Naturally, this throws the promise of giving all Kansas students an equal opportunity at an education out the window.
Legislators, however, would prefer we saw this as a way to get “big government,” — i.e., the State of Kansas — out of our lives. This shirking of responsibility, they say, is really a way to give local districts more “freedom” to design curriculums and programs unique to their districts.
How so? The districts themselves can raise the funds to target their priorities.
For real.
So if the wealthy Blue Valley school district wants to hire professional football coaches for their Timberwolves, they can, under the proposed law, by raising their mill levy. Same goes for the school’s swimming and diving teams, their French Honor Society and math club. Altogether, Blue Valley has 38 clubs for its students, ranging from baking to yearbook.
Yes, Iola’s Marching Mustangs are something to be proud of, but making their support dependant on a local property tax vote seems unduly harsh.
OF ALL the directives listed in HB 2741, the most “egregious” according to Superintendent Koehn is the funneling of public monies to private schools and those who homeschool. Not only will these entities be free from financial monitoring, but also their methods of education will have no review.
Under the legislation, parents would receive 70 percent of what their school district typically would receive for their child’s education. Koehn predicts this setup would quickly create a “cottage industry” for homeschooling, subject to widespread abuse and further destabilization of public education.
MODERATE Republicans, including our Rep. Kent Thompson, seem alarmingly calm about the legislation, saying it’s a last-ditch effort by ultra-conservatives to change school finance before November’s elections, where many of the ultras face certain defeat.
That confidence is misplaced.
