Topeka ? The increased school funding that voters in the Lawrence school district approved last month would be effectively wiped out under a bill now working its way through the Kansas Senate.

Sixth-graders Grace Sharon, left front, and Zella Lubin-Meyer confer over a measurement of Lubin-Meyer's vertical jump in the hallway outside their Guided Studies classroom Tuesday at Liberty Memorial Central Middle School. In back are Sophie Brandon, partially obscured, back left, and Kiersten Baber.

In a mail ballot election that was completed Jan. 27, voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to let the district keep about $1.4 million in locally generated school funding.

But on Tuesday, the Senate Ways and Means Committee heard testimony on a bill that would effectively wipe out that increase by changing the way some state aid is distributed.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Lawrence Superintendent Rick Doll said in a telephone interview after the hearing.

All that is the result of a long series of events that started last year with the Kansas Supreme Court ordering lawmakers to increase so-called “equalization” aid for school districts. Lawmakers passed a school finance bill that provided even more of an increase than the court ordered, but now they face a budget crisis and need to figure out how to close a projected $280 million revenue shortfall in the current fiscal year.

Committee chairman Sen. Ty Masterson, R-Andover, denied that the bill he is pushing is meant to “cut” anything, but instead aims to “reduce the increase” approved last year.

According to printouts from the Department of Education, Masterson’s bill would cut Lawrence’s state aid by $1.3 million.

“Most of our employees are contracted people so it’s not like we could turn around tomorrow and decide to cut some people,” Doll said.

If the bill passes, he said, Lawrence schools could do things like leave vacant positions open and stop buying supplies. But that probably wouldn’t be enough to absorb the entire cut.

“At this point in the game it would be very difficult to cut $1.3 million,” Doll said.

The committee has not yet voted on whether to send the bill to the full Senate.

Responding to school finance order

The changes that lawmakers made last year came in response to a Kansas Supreme Court ruling which found that lawmakers had been violating the Kansas Constitution by not fully funding two “equalization” formulas.

Equalization aid is the additional money the state spends to subsidize school districts so that districts with low property valuations don’t have to levy significantly higher taxes to raise comparable amounts of money as wealthier districts.

But that didn’t really give districts more spending authority. It only altered the mixture of funding sources so that a greater percentage of the total pot would come from the state instead of local property taxes. And in Lawrence’s case, the sum total of all the changes lawmakers made would have been a cut of about $2 million in state funding.

In the election-year pressure of 2014, many lawmakers wanted to be seen as having done more, so they made additional changes, and one of those was to give districts permission to raise the limit on how much revenue districts could raise locally, or their “local option budgets.”

That allowed Lawrence to recoup about $1.4 million of the $2 million that it lost. To keep that funding for future years, a public vote was necessary. That’s what the January mail ballot decided.

During committee hearings last year, lawmakers were given estimates of what the move would cost the state. But what nobody could accurately predict at the time was how school districts would respond to the changes, because districts don’t set their budgets for the new school year until August, three months after the Legislature adjourns.

As it turned out, many local districts, including Lawrence, took advantage of the new funding available, and the actual cost of the changes in the LOB formula came in $34.3 million higher than lawmakers had anticipated.

Now, Republicans like Sen. Steve Fitzgerald of Leavenworth are blaming the Department of Education for not having accurately predicted what would happen.

“We had a fiscal note that that increase would be $129 million. In fact, that fiscal note was erroneous,” Fitzgerald said.

But Mark Tallman, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said the Legislature still should have to fund the bill it passed last year.

“We would certainly anticipate that if there had been, for want of a better word, a different surprise, and it turned out less money was needed, the Legislature would be entitled to reduce that funding,” Tallman said. “We think that in this case, districts adopted budgets in good faith under current law. We would hope these dollars would be funded.”

Redefining wealth

Masterson argued that one of the problems with the current formula is that it doesn’t accurately define “wealth,” and he continually pointed to the Blue Valley school district in Johnson County as the classic example.

Blue Valley is a rapidly growing suburban area, known for its upper-income neighborhoods full of large, and very expensive homes, along with numerous retail shopping districts, office buildings and industrial parks. It has a total assessed valuation of $2.3 billion, ranking third behind Shawnee Mission and Wichita by that measure.

It also ranks high in terms of the personal wealth of its residents. Only 8.5 percent of its students qualified as “economically disadvantaged” last year, compared to 50 percent statewide.

Masterson contrasted that with the Hamilton school district in Greenwood County, where 65.5 percent of students are economically disadvantaged. But with only 82 students, and total valuation of more than $9 million, it receives very little equalization aid.

“They can only raise $8,500 with a mill (of property tax),” Masterson said. “And in this formula, they’re rich. They don’t qualify like the poor people in Blue Valley.”

That’s because Blue Valley is also one of the largest districts in the state, with total enrollment last year of more than 22,000 students. That works out to a valuation of $108,735 per-pupil, ranking it 62nd in the state by that measure, low enough for it to qualify for a small amount of equalization aid.

On a per-pupil basis, the wealthiest district in Kansas is Burlington, at $479,577 per-pupil, because it’s home to the Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant but only 815 students.

Second is the tiny district of Satanta, at $475,114 per student. It’s located in an area of southwest Kansas that has lots of oil and gas wells, but only 281 students.

The Lawrence district last year ranked fifth in terms of total valuation, at just less than $1 billion. But with an enrollment of 11,347 full time equivalent students, it ranked 96th on a per-pupil basis, with a valuation of $87,819 per student.

Masterson’s bill would change the formula so that a district would qualify for equalization aid based on its total valuation, not its per-pupil valuation. That means the large districts at the top of the total valuation chart would lose millions of dollars in state aid. And the changes would take effect immediately, in the current fiscal year.