Topeka ? On one side are Kansas school districts under siege, cutting programs and personnel and increasing fees to stay afloat while policymakers demand better student performance.

On the other side are conservative critics who say school budgets are top-heavy with administrative expenses and frills.

Hovering in the background is a judge’s ruling, on appeal before the Kansas Supreme Court, that says the state’s system of financing schools is unconstitutional.

Trying to make sense of these conflicting views are voters, parents and 450,000 students in Kansas public schools.

How to settle the argument?

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is in the schools-need-more-money camp, but has said that to make sure school officials are spending money wisely, she wants to audit school districts.

“There needs to be an assurance of how those dollars are going to be spent,” Sebelius said in an interview with the Journal-World. “Certainly, teacher pay and classroom assistance is the key place for those dollars to end up and not kind of disappearing into layers of administrative bureaucracy.”

She said she would be working this fall on ways to audit the state’s school districts.

Sebelius proposed audits during the last legislative session, but the discussion was quickly submerged by debates over her tax-increase proposals, which ultimately failed. But a review of how individual school districts spend their money was back on the table, she said.

The positions over whether schools need more money are often argued in the Capitol.

Karl Peterjohn, executive director of the Kansas Taxpayers Network, says Kansas already is spending enough on schools, ranking first among its neighboring states at an average of about $9,000 per student, which is nearly $1,000 more per student than the second-highest state in the region, Colorado.

“From the point of view of the taxpayer, why is it costing more per pupil here than in neighboring states?” Peterjohn said.

‘Allocation problem’

The answer, he says, is that Kansas schools waste too much on administrative expenses, which robs money from the classroom.

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“There is not a funding shortage in Kansas,” he said. “There is perhaps a serious allocation problem in terms of getting the biggest bang for tax dollars.”

Mark Tallman, who represents the Kansas Association of School Boards, doesn’t argue with Peterjohn’s statistics, but said they were misleading.

Total spending per student has accelerated faster than the inflation rate, but that figure includes costs for specialized programs mandated by the government and restricted funds, such as paying off building debt, that are not available to provide instruction to the general student population, he said.

“If you keep raising expectations and asking us to do more, it will take more money to make that happen. No one is saying we can improve our highway system and it isn’t going to cost more money,” Tallman said.

He and other education advocates use what is known as the base state aid per student to show that state funding is lagging.

Unchanging base

The base state aid is the amount allocated to school districts for each student in the state.

The difference in the base state aid and the average state aid is that base state aid doesn’t include additional funds provided for schools with low enrollment, or for teaching students from disadvantaged backgrounds or other special circumstances — populations the Legislature has determined merit more money.

The current base state aid is $3,863 per student, the same as it was last year and the year before that.

In fact, since base state aid per student was instituted in 1993, it is running about $920 below what it would have been if adjusted for inflation.

This failure to pump more money into “the base” has hurt teacher salaries and classroom instruction, Tallman argues.

Kansas rank: 42nd

According to the Kansas National Education Assn., teacher salaries in Kansas rank 42nd in the nation, and in the past 10 years have dropped 10 percent when adjusted for inflation.

Sebelius said more revenue was needed for teacher salaries and classroom instruction.

“The single most important function of state government is to educate our children,” she said.

But, she said, Kansans must be assured their tax dollars are well spent.

“Parents, taxpayers, business owners need to know that this is not just throwing money at a situation, that there is a strategy involved and that those dollars are going to find a way to areas that will make a difference for kids,” she said.