Topeka ? A legislative measure aimed at the possible elimination of funding of Kansas University’s School of Social Welfare because of a human sexuality class gained and lost support at the same time Monday.

Last week, the Kansas Senate put the provision in its budget bill after state Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, accused KU professor Dennis Dailey of using inappropriate videos and making inappropriate comments to teach the class — an allegation that KU denied.

Under Wagle’s amendment, funding of a university department could be terminated if obscene materials were used in a sexuality class curriculum.

On Monday, House and Senate budget writers met to negotiate differences in the two chambers’ budget proposals. The House budget did not contain Wagle’s measure, but House budget leaders quickly accepted the Senate position.

But even as the provision picked up the backing of House budget writers, Senate budget leaders said numerous proposals in the appropriations bills needed to be jettisoned because they had more to do with public policy than line-item funding of state government.

“This is one of several provisos we need to review,” state Sen. Stephen Morris, R-Hugoton, and chairman of the Senate budget writing committee said of Wagle’s provision. “We’re getting a long way away from appropriations on some of these provisos.”

The appropriations bill is full of provisos — items stuck in by lawmakers, sometimes in strategic moves to send a message to an agency or change a major policy without a full-blown debate on the issue.

And some simply reflect a political issue of the moment, such as a proviso to prohibit investments by the state pension system in French companies.

House members added that proviso to protest France’s criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Another proviso by the House would prevent the KU Medical Center from transferring control of the Landon Center on Aging to another program.

House members said the proviso was put in there because of concern about KU’s plan to move the department of neurology into the Landon Center.

They said they feared geriatric programs would be downgraded.

That notion has also raised concern from former U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, R-Kan., who helped get federal funding for what became the Landon Center.

In a recent, handwritten letter to Donald Hagen, executive vice chancellor of the KU Medical Center, Kassebaum said, “I had hoped the Center would be devoted to geriatrics — care, outreach and research. Perhaps, my goals were too large.”

She added that if it was not possible to build a “strong and leading Center on Aging then it seems to me that we should understand exactly how the Center will operate and how the program will be sustained.”

Janet Murguia, executive vice chancellor at KU, said fiscal constraints had prevented KU from “carrying out the original vision” of a sort of one-stop shop to treat and research the ailments of the elderly. But Murguia said moving the neurology department into the center coincided with research on certain diseases that affect the elderly.

Late Monday, the House-Senate conference committee agreed on a provision that would require KU to maintain a geriatric primary care clinic at the Landon Center on Aging, which KU officials have stated they always intended to do.

Other provisos in the budget bills cover a wide range of public policy, from setting up a commission study to the possible closure of a state hospital to dealing with water releases in certain reservoirs.