Legislators this summer managed to avoid a statewide tax increase and still pump $290 million into the state school finance system. But residents in Lawrence and other bigger Kansas school districts will probably see their wallets lightened anyway.

The reason: A provision in the school finance bill allowing districts to raise their local option budgets, commonly called the LOB, from 25 percent to 27 percent of their total general funds. The LOB is money that comes directly from local property owners instead of the state treasury.

In Lawrence, that provision last week made way for the largest local school levy increase in six years – a 5.504-mill hike that means the owner of a $100,000 home will pay an additional $60 in property taxes this year over last year.

“It’s critical at this point,” Supt. Randy Weseman said, noting that local schools had lived without funding increases for nearly half a decade. “We’re still going to have to rely on some support locally. … (but) we’re not immune to the fact that it’s still a local tax.”

Alan Cobb, chairman of the Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, said the debates over local option budgets may not be a bad thing.

“I think having more local control over budgets and spending and taxing is a good thing,” he said.

Officials at the Kansas State Department of Education said they won’t know until the end of September how many districts are raising taxes on their local patrons.

Biggest hit

But Mark Tallman, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said he expects such increases to be widespread.

“There will be some districts where the local property tax is very sensitive, and they don’t want to do that,” Tallman said. “There are many other districts that are responding to pent-up demand in their budgets … that we know will do that.”

But even though many districts will raise their local option budgets, it’s residents in larger towns that will take the biggest hit.

That’s because the Legislature – at the behest of the Kansas Supreme Court – agreed to kick in extra state aid to smaller and poorer districts that raised their local option budgets.

That provision allowed Baldwin schools to slice three mills of tax from their general fund, though additional local taxes for building projects resulted in an overall bump of half a mill in the district’s budget. A mill is $1 of tax for every $1,000 of a property’s assessed valuation.

That same provision also allowed the Eudora and Perry-Lecompton school districts to keep their taxes down.

“We’re happy to have an additional amount of state aid to not increase the burden on our taxpayers,” Baldwin Supt. Jim White said.

Weseman, though, declined to be critical of a system that puts a greater burden on patrons of larger districts.

“We live in an area that’s too wealthy, and it doesn’t pencil out in the formula to do that,” he said. “I’m assuming the state thinks that’s fair, and that’s the law that we go by.”

Breathing room

Like Lawrence, the smaller area school districts say they’re using the new money from state and local funding to keep class sizes small and to give teachers and staff long-overdue raises.

“I think everybody you talk to is going to have concerns about rising costs of fuel and energy, but we are finding the Legislature provided some breathing room for us, so it’s not a crisis,” said Steve Johnston, superintendent of Perry-Lecompton schools.

The higher cap for local option budgets helped create that breathing room, said Eudora Supt. Marty Kobza.

“It was important for us to do that, in terms of we’re playing catch-up from the last five years … anything helped,” Kobza said.

Alan Rupe, the Wichita attorney representing school districts that sued the state over its finance formula, said the heavy reliance on local funding means Kansas is still underfunding schools.

The Legislature is expected to wrestle with that issue once again at its next session, starting in January.

“It doesn’t surprise me that every district is using every measure it can,” Rupe said. “We have not reached adequacy yet. This is an interim measure – there’s still close to $568 million that needs to be put into the system … to fund a suitable and adequate education.”