K-12 Student Performance and Efficiency Commission members Dave Trabert, left, Ken Thiessen and Mike O'Neal listen as other members of the group discuss the commission's final report.

Topeka ? A panel appointed by the Kansas Legislature to recommend ways public schools can be more efficient with their money issued its final report Tuesday.

Among other things, the K-12 Student Performance and Efficiency Commission recommended lawmakers pass a bill requiring school districts to undergo annual audits to determine whether they are complying with certain financial management “best practices.”

The commission also agreed to recommend legislation to set up another commission to study the so-called Rose standards, a set of educational outcomes that the Kansas Supreme Court has said it will use as the benchmark to determine whether the state is providing adequate funding for public schools.

In setting that standard, the Supreme Court remanded back to a lower court the question of whether overall school funding in Kansas is adequate. Last week, a three-judge panel in Topeka ruled that public schools in Kansas are unconstitutionally underfunded, even taking the Rose standards into account, and suggesting that it could take upwards of $548 million a year in additional funding in order to be considered adequate.

“In light of what’s gone down over the last week, this is probably a pretty timely avenue for establishing these Rose standards and what they are,” commission chairman Sam Williams, of Wichita, said.

But the commission backed away from a controversial proposal, a bill that would drastically reduce the number of issues that school districts are required to negotiate with local teachers unions.

A majority of the commission said they wanted to hold off on that issue because the Kansas Association of School Boards and the Kansas National Education Association are still negotiating possible changes to the Professional Negotiations Act, which spells out the issues that must be negotiated in master contracts with teachers.

“Right now, our position as a commission has been, let’s let the process proceed,” Williams said.

The proposal to require annual audits stirred some controversy. The draft bill would create another panel that would establish certain “best practices” for financial management of school districts and then require annual audits to find out if districts were complying with those practices.

Commissioners agreed to put that in their final report only after more moderate members insisted language be added ensuring that the state would pay for the cost of the audits.

“My basic concern is, we’re dealing with another unfunded mandate,” said commission member John Vratil, a former Republican state senator from Leawood. “We have said as a commission we don’t favor unfunded mandates. Then we consider legislation that imposes another unfunded mandate. I just think it’s very hypocritical.”

But Dave Trabert, president of the conservative think tank Kansas Policy Institute, supported requiring the audits.

“I would remind the commission that the reason this is proposed is that we’ve heard months of testimony indicating that schools are operating inefficiently, often by choice,” Trabert said. “We’ve heard Legislative Post Audit indicating that schools are operating inefficiently. That’s been the audit results for years, frankly.”

Janis Lee, a former Democratic state senator from Kensington, strongly disagreed with that statement.

“I know that efficiency is one of the things they work very hard for to get the money into the classroom,” Lee said.

Trabert said one example is that some districts choose not to contract out for certain things like food service, even though it could be cheaper for them to do so.

The commission’s report is expected to be finalized later this week. It will be forwarded to the Kansas Legislature when it convenes the 2015 session on Jan. 12.