photo by: Peter Hancock

Mark Tallman of the Kansas Association of School Boards reviews education data with local school officials, lawmakers and candidates Monday in advance of an upcoming special session of the Kansas Legislature.

Kansas public schools are doing a better job than most of their peers when it comes to giving students a basic education, officials from the Kansas Association of School Boards told local officials Monday.

But speaking to an audience of local school board members and candidates for the Kansas Legislature, KASB said schools face a number of challenges going forward, such as rising costs, a growing number of non-English speaking students and children living in poverty, plus financial pressures brought on by limited funding from the state.

Borrowing the famous phrase from Charles Dickens, KASB lobbyist Mark Tallman described the current environment as “the best of times and the worst of times” for public schools in Kansas.

“We’re not quite sure how to answer that because I think we all feel we are facing enormous challenges, and yet we think there are also some very exciting things going on and there are some very positive things we want to report on as well,” Tallman said.

Monday’s discussion in Lawrence was part of KASB’s ongoing “statewide advocacy tour,” designed to share with local school officials and political candidates KASB’s talking points about the state of public education in Kansas.

On the positive side, Tallman said, there has been a steady increase over the last 25 years in the number of Kansans who have graduated from high school and have received at least some college education. And in the last 15 years, the number of Kansans with a bachelor’s degree or higher has grown nearly 50 percent.

Currently, he said, Kansas schools rank eighth in the nation when looking at performance across a broad range of measurements. And the seven states ranked above Kansas — New Hampshire; New Jersey; Massachusetts; Vermont; Indiana; Iowa; and Nebraska — all spend considerably more money per pupil than Kansas does.

Still, Tallman said, fewer than half of all students who took the state’s standardized tests in English and math last year scored at levels indicating they are on track to be ready for college or careers after graduation.

And although overall funding for public schools has been increasing, now surpassing $6 billion a year, when all sources of funds are counted, those increases have not kept pace with inflation since the start of the Great Recession in 2008.

As a result, Tallman said, staffing levels have been reduced across the board in public schools since 2010, including reductions in the number of teachers, core support staff and administrators.

Meanwhile, he said, the number of students qualifying for free or reduced price meals has grown steadily over the last 15 years, to nearly 50 percent of all students today. And he said there is a direct link between higher poverty rates and lower student achievement in reading and math.

The presentation in Lawrence came less than two weeks before Kansas lawmakers will return to the Statehouse in Topeka for a special session to respond to a recent Kansas Supreme Court ruling on school funding equity.

But it also came as school districts across Kansas are bracing themselves for the 2017 session when lawmakers are expected to write an entirely new school funding formula.

Among those in the audience Monday were several local legislators, as well as candidates who have filed to challenge incumbents.

“I think it was a good presentation, especially about the overall funding and how it looks more level than I had even thought,” said Sen. Marci Francisco, D-Lawrence. “We know the money has gone up for KPERS (retirement contributions) and things like that, so (you can) really see that other funds have necessarily gone down to keep that overall level pretty consistent.”

But Francisco’s Republican challenger this year, Meredith Richey of Perry, said she was skeptical about portions of the presentation, especially about comparisons between Kansas and other states.

“A lot of the statistics they show me in comparison to other states may or may not be viable to me, depending on the criteria they use to pick those state comparisons,” she said.