In a stunning move, Kansas legislators decided Friday to dip into university tuition and fee money to pay for increases in K-12 education.

It’s bad enough to ask Kansas University students and their families to pay increased tuition and fees to help offset declines in state support for higher education.

But what if state legislators decided to take that tuition and fee money away from the university’s budget and direct it to an entirely different use, like, say, to increase funding for K-12 schools in the state?

Incredibly, that’s exactly what members of the House Ways and Means Committee did Friday when approving a budget for higher education in the state. Here’s how it worked:

In her budget, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius proposed a $34 million increase for the state’s six universities. Of that, $3.3 million would be for faculty salaries as promised in the Higher Education Coordination Act, $13 million would go to fund the 27th pay period that occurs once every 11 years and $18 million would be in the form of a block grant.

The governor also proposed a 2.5 percent pay increase for state employees. If universities agreed to pay the same raises to their employees, about half of that amount could come from the $18 million block grant; the other half would have to come from the universities’ “special revenue funds.” Those are funds universities raise through tuition and student fees for such things as parking, housing and the student health center, funds that come directly from students.

Then the House Appropriations Committee went to work. In the name of carving out money for K-12 education, committee members slashed away all of the $13 million allocated for the 27th pay period and all but about $3 million of the universities’ $18 million block grant. The $3.3 million from the reorganization act was saved, but increases for higher education had been cut from the governor’s $34 million to about $6 million.

But that wasn’t enough. Because committee members had canceled all but three months of the 2.5 percent salary increase for state employees, they reasoned that universities no longer would need the student fee/tuition money they would have contributed for that purpose and instead decreed that money would be transferred to the state’s general fund. They said that money would be used to fund K-12 education, but once it’s in the general fund, it could be used to fund any number of state government activities.

At the end of the day, the state’s six universities had lost almost all of their proposed $18 million block grant, and in addition to that, the committee had put the universities $12.5 million in the hole by confiscating student fee/tuition funds that they had decided the universities no longer needed.

The committee’s action is stunning in its audacity. Some of the members of the committee probably were among legislators who have voiced concerns about rising tuition at state universities, but they apparently are willing to take (is steal too strong a word?) that money and use it for something totally unrelated to the students’ university education. This is not general tax money paid by all Kansans. It is money students pay for a specific service: their education at a state university.

The Senate has passed a university budget bill that includes allocations close to what the governor recommended. Perhaps senators will provide the voice of reason when the House and Senate conference committee goes to work on the matter. Still, you have to wonder about legislators who think there’s anything ethical about siphoning off the hard-earned tuition and fee dollars paid by state university students to fund other parts of the state’s budget.