Funding disparities make school choice costly for taxpayers

You wouldn’t pay $6,400 for something you could get for $5,000.

That would be wasting money.

But Ken Kennedy says that’s what the state of Kansas does when it lets students who live in big school districts attend school in small school districts.

“It happens all the time,” said Kennedy, who’s school superintendent in Pratt.

“Here in Pratt, we get about $5,000 in state aid per pupil,” he said. “But if a kid in Pratt – for whatever reason – chooses to go to (neighboring district) Skyline, the state pays Skyline $6,440.”

In Kansas, small districts receive more state aid than midsize and large districts.

The Pratt district has 1,179 students; Skyline has 438.

More than half of the students attending Skyline schools live in the Pratt district.

“I figure it costs the state about $250,000 a year, just for what’s going on between Pratt and Skyline,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy doesn’t object to Pratt-district parents choosing to send their sons and daughters to Skyline. But these choices, he said, shouldn’t increase the state’s costs.

“The taxpayers of the state of Kansas should not pay extra for kids who, by choice, go to another district,” Kennedy said.

Earlier this year, Kennedy urged several legislators to include this and other issues in the debate over school finance.

He didn’t get far.

“We looked at changing some things, but it got to be a bookkeeping nightmare,” said House Minority Leader Dennis McKinney, D-Greensburg.

Education officials, McKinney said, assured legislators that the Pratt-Skyline situation was unusual.

“It doesn’t appear to be a going on in more than a few places throughout the state,” he said.

Also, McKinney said, that costs of letting large-district students attend small-district schools should, in theory, be offset by small-district students attending big schools.

Outdated boundaries

The Pratt-Skyline situation is unusual, he said, because Skyline High School is 1.4 miles west of the Pratt city limits and only a half-mile from the boundary between the two districts.

But, Kennedy argued, similar scenarios exist throughout the state.

“We have 120 students going out and 35 coming in,” said Alan Cunningham, an assistant superintendent with the Dodge City school district.

It’s not unusual, Cunningham said, for the district’s rural students to choose to attend smaller schools in the Spearville and Minneola districts.

Spearville and Minneola schools receive considerably more state aid than Dodge City schools.

“It doesn’t even itself out,” Cunningham said.

Hutchinson loses students to the smaller Nickerson and Haven school districts.

“We have open borders,” said Ray Hemman, communications director at the Hutchinson school district.

Weighty issues

In Kansas, state aid for school districts is based on several “weighting” factors designed to offset differences in costs of operation.

Historically, low-enrollment districts have received more state aid because their operational costs – buildings, staffing, utilities – are higher relative to those in high-enrollment districts. High-enrollment districts can spread their costs over hundreds of students, while low-enrollment districts cannot.

In its recent ruling, the Kansas Supreme Court said it was troubled by the way low-enrollment weightings were justified. Last year, small schools divided more than $225 million in low-enrollment aid.

“What happened is the school district boundaries were laid out in the 1960s and, since then, the cities’ boundaries changed so much : they need to be redrawn,” he said. “If you live across the river in South Hutch, you’re in the Nickerson school district.”

Nickerson schools receive more in state aid than Hutchinson schools.

Because of how the boundaries are drawn, the Buhler school district has two elementary schools within the Hutchinson city limits. But Buhler and Hutchinson’s state aid, Hemman said, are comparable.

Inefficient system

Lawrence Supt. Randy Weseman said he’s sure USD 497 loses some students to Eudora, Baldwin and Perry-Lecompton. But the disparities in state aid, he said, are minor.

“We’re not the problem,” Weseman said. “The problem is we have 301 school districts in the state of Kansas, and 157 of them don’t have as many students (600) as we have at West Junior High.

“I’m all for small schools; hey, I’m from Dighton,” he said. “But at some point we’ve got to start talking about efficiencies.”

No one seems to know how much it is costing taxpayers for big-school students to attend small schools. It’s not been the subject of a formal study.

It should be, Kennedy said.

“The way I see it, we have three issues before us: efficiency, equity and adequacy,” he said, referring to the state’s ongoing debate over how to respond to the recent Kansas Supreme Court ruling. “We need to look at all three, but it doesn’t do much good to take on equity and adequacy until after you’ve dealt with efficiency. We haven’t done that.

“What we have now is a system that’s costing more than we could be paying.”