To the editor:

Now that our Legislature is preparing, we hope, for the rump session (Journal-World, April 21), a chorus should be rising, “What are you going to do about school funding?” We should demand that hyperbole like “sending the Kansas economy into a death spiral” (Doug Mays’ response to the governor’s call for action) be avoided in the interest of arriving at a reasonable solution.

A relevant question is what will become of the Kansas economy if we let our schools deteriorate? A more immediate question is where do our legislators think school taxes are spent? In China? In Colorado? The biggest single expenditure and the most important is teacher salaries. Surely most of our teachers live and spend their money in Kansas. So do the janitors, secretaries and principals. So do the contractors and construction workers. The only appreciable out-of-state expenditure is for textbooks, and that is pretty well fixed whatever the level of funding. Money appropriated for school funding is certainly more recycled through the state economy than any other state expenditure I can think of — and so are the enormous benefits.

Paul Enos,

Lawrence