If Kansans are bent out of shape about their schools running out of money, their legislators aren’t hearing much about it, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius told an invitation-only group of education lobbyists last week.

Sebelius encouraged the group to build a fire under its constituencies.

“She’s like the rest of us, she’s frustrated,” said Mark Desetti, a lobbyist with the Kansas National Education Assn. “She wants to make sure people are sharing their feelings with their legislators.”

Desetti was one of about 10 lobbyists who met with the governor late Thursday morning.

During the meeting, Sebelius said legislators appeared to be feeling little or no heat from their constituents on school-funding issues.

Others in the meeting said the governor expressed disappointment in both the one-year, $102 million plan being assembled in the House and in the Senate’s three-year, $455 million package. Neither plan, as yet, has a long-term funding source.

Sebelius was in Washington, D.C., on Monday and Tuesday for the National Governors Assn.’s winter conference. Attempts to reach her for comment were unsuccessful.

The governor’s press secretary, Nicole Corcoran, confirmed the meeting.

“She called the meeting to engage the lobbyists, to see if they were working together, which they had not been,” Corcoran wrote in an e-mail to the Journal-World. “She asked them to mobilize their constituencies.”

In an e-mail to school officials throughout the state, United School Administrators of Kansas Executive Director Jim Menze said that the governor indicated she would not let her disappointment get in the way of the Legislature’s plan reaching the Kansas Supreme Court.

“Whatever the Legislature comes up with can become law without her signature. She doesn’t have to sign it,” Menze said. “So, either way, she said she wouldn’t be an impediment.”

Menze said the governor declined to say whether she would call a special session.

“I got the impression that there’s concern the Legislature would use a special session to put in an extra three or four million dollars as sort of bargaining tool with the Supreme Court,” Menze said. “But — and this is just my opinion — I don’t know if the Supreme Court is going to bargain anymore. This has been going on a long time.”

Corcoran said the governor reminded the group that after lawmakers scuttled her school-finance plan last year, she learned it would not have passed Supreme Court scrutiny because it was based on formula mechanizations rather than actual costs of educating children.

This year’s House and Senate plans to increase state aid with so-called one-time money, Sebelius said, are equally flawed.

Sebelius in 2004 proposed increases in the state sales, income and property taxes to fund a $304 million increase for public schools. The governor’s plan failed in the Senate.

Rep. Paul Davis, D-Lawrence, affirmed Sebelius’ view that few legislators were being pressured by their constituents to find more money for schools.

“I sense that there is not the momentum from the education community that there was last year and the year before,” Davis said. “Much of that, I think, is because when the Supreme Court ruling came out, everybody sort of took a breather because they figured the ruling would take care of everything.”

He added: “That’s turned out to be a very serious mistake.”