The Eudora school district has developed a wish list for a half million dollars in new staffing should the Kansas Legislature provide the district more money.

The $526,000 staff priority list the Eudora school board approved Dec. 8 — developed with input from district residents and staff — would have the district hire 10 staff members should additional revenue be forthcoming from any new K-12 funding formula the Legislature approves in its 2017 session, which starts next month. The priority list, which does not suggest preference in the order of the 10 hires, is nonbinding and is to be updated annually.

The 10 priority hires include five teachers, one additional high school counselor, a Eudora Middle School assistant principal, a grounds or maintenance employee and two district support staffers.

The additional teachers would include classroom hires for Eudora elementary and middle schools, an elementary-level art teacher, a middle school forensics, debate and English teacher, and the expanding to full-time the current half-time high school woodworking instructor. The additional teachers would cost the district an estimated $251,902 in salary and benefits and the assistant principal position an estimated $71,000.

Eudora and other state school districts have seen no new money from the state since the Kansas Legislature in 2015 scrubbed the state’s 23-year-old old school funding formula and replaced it with direct block grants to school districts. The block grant system was meant to be a temporary fix as lawmakers worked to develop a new funding formula.

The block grants froze funding at 2013-2014 levels, which means growing school districts like Eudora not only feel a budget pinch from inflation but received no added per-pupil money for growing enrollment.

Eudora Superintendent Steve Splichal said the Legislature was not only under the gun from its own mandate and that of Gov. Sam Brownback to approve a K-12 funding formula in the coming legislative session, but also from the Kansas Supreme Court ruling in February that found the block grants unconstitutional.

“They don’t have a choice,” he said. “They have to do something. The block grant system sunsets in June. Really, there has to be some mechanism approved by the Legislature and signed by the governor in place in June.”

The school formula doesn’t have be new, Splichal said.

“There really wasn’t anything wrong with the old formula but the manner it was funded,” he said. “The best way to get some resolution with that is take a look at the old formula. If there’s some structural issue, deal with that issue and move down the road.”

Although he didn’t have the exact figures, Splichal said the Eudora district’s enrollment grew by 10-20 students each of the three years the block grant system has been in place. Reinstating the old school formula would increase the district’s revenue by “several hundred thousand dollars,” Splichal said. That would go a long way to funding the priority list, he said.

The school funding formula will be considered during a session in which the Legislature confronts the state’s overall budget shortfall.

“That’s the gorilla in the room,” Splichal said. “The state is $345 million down this fiscal year. The Legislature has a lot of heavy lifting to do.”