Lawrence voters overwhelmingly approve keeping local option budget at 33 percent

Lawrence voters overwhelmingly approved the Lawrence school district keeping its local option budget at 33 percent.

Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said Tuesday that 84 percent of partcipating voters in the school district voted yes, and 16 percent voted no. Nearly 17,300 ballots were cast in the county’s first ever mail-ballot election, an almost 33 percent turnout, which Shew described as “excellent.”

The measure approved by voters will allow the district to keep its local option budget at 33 percent indefinitely. Had voters denied the request, it would have forced the district to lower its local option budget to 31 percent, resulting in a funding decrease of approximately $1.4 million.

“I want to thank the Lawrence voters for approving the request to maintain the current level of funding,” Lawrence Superintendent Rick Doll said. “We never take for granted our citizens and are very thankful for their support.”

Lawrence School Board President Shannon Kimball said she was “thrilled” with the results, which surpassed her expectations.

“Over 80 percent approval — I thought we hit the ball out of the park with the bond issue,” she said, referring to the $92.5 million bond issue that won 72 percent approval in 2013.

Doll said that classroom sizes and various district programs — for athletics, arts or at-risk students — could have taken a hit if the measure had failed.

A local option budget is funding that is raised by local property taxes for school districts. The size of a district’s local option budget cannot be larger than 33 percent (the maximum was 31 percent until a year ago) of its general operating fund, which for Lawrence is about $72.2 million. Local option budgets exist to give districts and voters some local control over school funding.

With uncertainty over school finance looming in the Legislature, Doll said the vote was especially important for the district.

“We can’t predict what changes in school finance are going to come our way from Topeka, but we have always appreciated the Lawrence community’s support, and this is just another example of that,” Doll said. “As long as we don’t get cut by the state, it allows us to keep our current programs in place.”

The election stemmed from a new law the Legislature passed last April that changed how state funding for schools is calculated. It stipulated that students enrolled in virtual schools would no longer count toward a district’s official enrollment. That and other factors cost the Lawrence district about $1.8 million in funding.

However, the state then created a path for districts across the state to recoup at least some of the funds lost at the expense of the new law. It allowed districts, for one year only, to raise their local option budgets from 31 percent to 33 percent by vote of their school boards. In September, the Lawrence school board voted to do just that, effectively recovering $1.4 million.

But for a district to keep its local option budget at 33 percent beyond year one, it needed the approval of registered voters living within the district, by mail.

The Legislature’s strategy of allowing district’s to increase their local option budgets has been controversial. Local option budgets were originally crafted to give districts a chance to go beyond minimum state requirements.

In December, a three-judge panel in Topeka ruled that education funding in Kansas is inadequate. The panel specifically stated that underfunding from the state has forced districts to rely heavily on local option budgets to meet basic requirements, and the panel called that system unconstitutional.

Mail system well-received

Shew and Doll both praised the mail-ballot process for the turnout it elicited. Shew said that another election on the local option budget in 2008, which was conducted at the polls, had an 11 percent turnout.

Doll was also pleased with the turnout, but noted the election had cost the district about $100,000 to run. An election at the polls would have been free.

“This experiment by the Legislature appears to have worked in increasing turnout,” Shew said.