After three days of sometimes testy and confrontational negotiations, House lawmakers agreed to accept the Senate’s plan for funding public education to satisfy a state Supreme Court mandate to adequately fund schools.
With the House-Senate conference committee nearing the brink of an impasse early Wednesday night, the House relented and accepted Gov. Laura Kelly’s school finance plan that the Senate passed in mid-March. It gets the Legislature one step closer to passing an education plan. The bill will run on Thursday.
The bill also includes policies advocated by the House, including one that could potentially broaden a program offering tax credits to businesses that donate money for scholarships to send the least affluent students to private schools.
Three days of meetings ended as House negotiators gave in to the Senate’s demands, but criticized their counterparts for not adhering to Republican principles on matters of education.
They castigated senators for refusing to adopt policies that would remove an automatic inflation adjustment for education and a requirement for superintendents to certify that they have allocated enough money to ensure that students have met a broad set of educational goals known as the Rose standards.
“We want to confirm that the Senate/Gov. Kelly plan is to refuse all the certification requirements that would ensure money be spent in the classroom first … and you would OK bad policies on (inflation), which is fiscally irresponsible,” said Rep. Kristey Williams, the lead negotiator for the House.
“The Senate/Gov. Kelly plan is to put taxpayers on the hook in perpetuity for inflation,” Williams said. “That means an estimated $50 million to $100 million more every year that will have to come from our highways, mental health, KPERS, corrections, foster care system,” she said.
Sen. Molly Baumgardner, the Senate’s lead negotiator, said she wasn’t going to get into a “tit-for-tat” about which chamber cares more about children.
She said the certification provision touted by the House posed risks. It exposed districts to legal liability if even one student fails to meet one or all of the Rose standards, a broad set of guidelines referenced by the Kansas Supreme Court in a decision in the ongoing school funding case from 2014.
“It is disingenuous, I believe at this time, at this late hour … in the attempt to come to an agreement on school funding, that there has been this expression that Senate Republicans just don’t care,” Baumgardner said. “This is not that we just don’t care.”
Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning said he would like to review the inflation escalator so it would be financially feasible.
Because the Kansas economy tends to lag behind the rest of the country, Denning said there could be a time when inflation might be rising when state revenues are declining. As a result, it would put the state in a mandatory spending bind, Denning said.
But the inflation provision, he said, doesn’t start until 2024 giving the state time to fix that issue.
Denning said the Legislature is running out of time to pass a school finance plan, leaving little room to address the inflation provision at the last minute in a conference committee.
Legal briefs with the Supreme Court are due April 15, and the Legislature’s regular session is set to end Friday.
“Time is of the essence,” said Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, one of the negotiators. “We need to get this done. I don’t think we need further delays at this point.”
The plan adopted by the Senate puts about $90 million into schools in 2020 and 2021 each, with the money intended to cover the cost of inflation to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling from last year. The plan also promises to put about $90 million into schools for fiscal years 2022 and 2023.
The House never voted on a school finance plan, which gave the Senate the upper hand in negotiations. The House did manage to win some policy concessions that included:
- A requirement for the Department of Education to create one-page performance accountability reports for the state, each school district, and each school building.
- A requirement for the Education Department to prepare annual longitudinal reports on student achievement on the state assessment for English language arts, math and science.
- A revision to a program that offers tax credits to entice businesses to donate money for scholarships that send the least affluent students to private schools. It now would make the scholarships available to the 100 lowest performing elementary schools, not just the lowest performing schools in general.
- A requirement for the Board of Education to provide the ACT college entrance exam and the three ACT WorkKeys assessments to each student enrolled in grades 11 and 12 at no charge. It would provide one pre-ACT exam for each student in the ninth grade as well.
- An extension to the work of the dyslexia task force by three years.
A couple provisions that did not get into the bill included:
- Requiring school districts to provide transportation to students living less than 2.5 miles from their school if there is no safe pedestrian route and there is no additional cost.
- Requiring the state Education Department to establish and maintain a statewide bullying-prevention hotline. The department also would have been required to identify the school district and school building where the bullying victim attends class, the name of the bullying victim, the alleged offender, as well as witnesses to the incident.
The bill also ultimately did not touch a law that provides for special education state aid at a rate of 92 percent of the excess costs of educating special needs children.
Republican state Rep. Kyle Hoffman, one of the House negotiators, said it appeared that the Senate was taking its cues from the governor’s office. He predicted the governor’s plan is financially unsustainable in the out years.
“Ironically, I think it’s going to end up that we are going to be out of money paying this about the time that Gov. Kelly is up for re-election,” Hoffman said.
Denning said the comments made in the conference committee were “unfortunate” and attributed it to lack of experience on the part of the House negotiators.
“We’ve tried to keep it above-board and cordial as we could and professional as we could,” Denning said.
“I’m glad that we accomplished what we needed to do to satisfy the school litigation, and we’ll come back next year and continue to work on school finance again.”
The day started with House Speaker Ron Ryckman Jr. offering a last-minute education finance plan to rival the one tendered by the governor and the Senate.
The House plan, billed as one the state could afford and still satisfy the state Supreme Court’s funding mandate, would have put about $126 million into education over four years.
However, the plan would have set aside another $243 million in an escrow account that would have been controlled by the Supreme Court.
Ryckman said at the beginning of the day he would agree to run the Senate plan if there weren’t enough votes to pass the latest education plan he introduced.
Some lawmakers said the latest House plan didn’t win much support because it came in just before the session was about to end and it was complicated to understand.
They said the plan drew opposition from a mix of conservatives who didn’t want to put any more money into schools as well as moderates and Democrats who backed the governor’s plan.
