photo by: Peter Hancock

Amy Martin, left, president of the Kansas Association of School Boards, and KASB lobbyist Mark Tallman outline the organization's priorities for a new school finance formula during a news conference at the Olathe Advanced Technology Center.

Olathe ? An organization representing school boards in Kansas said Thursday that the next education funding formula may need to look a lot like the old one that Kansas lawmakers repealed last year.

But the Kansas Association of School Boards said it wanted to be careful not to fall back on the verbiage and jargon of the old formula, something Republican leaders in the Legislature have said they have no interest in reviving.

The Kansas Association of School Boards unveiled its list of priorities during a news conference in the Olathe school district, mainly in response to Gov. Sam Brownback’s recent call soliciting public input about a new funding formula.

“We’re here today to urge our advocates of public schools to accept Governor Brownback’s invitation to provide information and input on what is needed to fund our school system,” KASB lobbyist Mark Tallman said.

photo by: Peter Hancock

Amy Martin, left, president of the Kansas Association of School Boards, and KASB lobbyist Mark Tallman outline the organization's priorities for a new school finance formula during a news conference at the Olathe Advanced Technology Center.

Although the organization did not offer a specific funding formula, it outlined five “key elements” that the group said must be part of any new formula.

Chief among those were three components that were central to the school funding formula that lawmakers repealed last year: overall adequacy of school funding; equitable distribution of funding across the state’s 286 school districts; and flexibility for local districts to raise additional money through local taxes to provide programs and services that go beyond the minimum state requirements.

Lawrence school board Vice President Shannon Kimball, who is also a regional vice president for KASB this year, said she agreed with the principles the organization outlined Thursday.

“They align with the priorities we’ve discussed in Lawrence as a district,” she said. “And we will be developing input to share with the governor.”

Kimball said the school board will discuss its own priorities over the next few weeks and will submit its own comments to the governor’s staff, probably by early October.

Prior to 2015, Kansas had a school funding formula that was based on those same concepts.

It began by giving each school district a uniform, per-pupil amount of funding that was theoretically tied to the actual cost of providing the required educational services. And in calculating each district’s enrollment, additional weight was given to certain hard-to-teach populations such as students from low-income or non-English speaking households.

Funding was provided through a uniform statewide property tax of 20 mills. Districts were allowed to levy additional money under what was called a “local option budget” to provide enhanced programs and services. They could also levy taxes for big-ticket purchases through their capital outlay funds and to make bond and interest payments.

What caused the most consternation among legislators, however, was the requirement to subsidize those additional local taxes for districts with less property wealth so they could raise comparable amounts of money as wealthier districts using comparable tax levies.

The formula used to calculate those equalization payments was hugely complicated, they complained, and it was nearly impossible for lawmakers to predict from one year to the next how much those equalization payments would cost as real estate prices rose or fell in various parts of the state.

In 2015, after learning that an increase in equalization aid they had approved the year before was going to cost tens of millions of dollars more than expected, lawmakers repealed that formula and replaced it for two years with a system of block grants that effectively froze every district’s funding in place until lawmakers could come up with a new plan.

Kimball said she thinks lawmakers overreacted by repealing the old formula.

“There are things they could have done within that framework to address those issues without completely throwing out the old formula,” she said.

She also said the temporary block grant system that has been in place since then has directly harmed the Lawrence district.

“We are a district that has growing numbers of students, growing numbers of students with high needs, and we’ve had no additional funding to address that for the last two years, resulting in a budget we adopted this year that eliminated 17 teaching positions,” she said.

Tallman acknowledged that much of the KASB’s priority list sounds like the old formula. But he said the organization isn’t necessarily pushing simply to reinstate the old law.

“We’re trying to make sure we’re not just automatically slipping back into the assumptions of what we’re used to,” Tallman said, “because what may emerge might be similar to what we’ve had before, or it might be very different.”