The Kansas Statehouse in Topeka.

Topeka ? Lawrence School District Superintendent Kyle Hayden said a budget-cutting bill in the Kansas Senate would drain the district’s cash reserves while forcing the district to impose a hiring freeze and make other cuts for the rest of this school year.

“We would freeze some of our internal spending,” Hayden said. “Purchasing, classroom materials, eliminating professional development for the rest of the year, eliminating travel, a freeze on hiring, until we have more of an idea what things will look like for next year.”

The Senate was originally expected to vote Thursday on the bill, which was intended to close a projected $320 million revenue shortfall for the rest of this fiscal year. Republican leaders in the Kansas Senate abruptly cancelled plans to debate the package Thursday morning after support evidently collapsed over the previous 24 hours.

The bill had called for cutting nearly $128 million, or 5 percent of this year’s budget for K-12 education.

It also called for cutting nearly $23 million from higher education, including $3.9 million from the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence and $3.2 million from the KU Medical Center. That would be on top of the combined $10 million cut those two campuses took earlier this fiscal year.

Gov. Sam Brownback had proposed filling this year’s hole without significant spending cuts, mainly by liquidating $362 million of invested idle funds and repaying that money to the idle funds account over the next seven years.

Also, his budget plan, which covered the rest of this fiscal year and each of the next two years, called for not repaying a $92 million quarterly payment into the state pension system that was delayed last year, adding it to the system’s unfunded liability, and continuing not to make the final quarterly payment into the system in 2018 and 2019.

But Republican leaders in the Senate said that would only push the state’s deficit back by a few years and that members of their caucus were insisting on some amount of cuts to restore “structural balance” to the state budget.

“As a leadership team, what we’ve learned from our caucus, and extensive conversations with them, is everybody’s on board for a structurally balanced budget that doesn’t kick the can down the road, that doesn’t use one-time money, that doesn’t spend money that we don’t have or that doesn’t make payments that we’re obligated to make,” Senate Vice President Jeff Longbine, R-Emporia, told reporters during a briefing Tuesday.

GOP leaders argue that most school districts taking big cuts under the plan could absorb those cuts by spending down their cash reserves. A spreadsheet showing how each district would be affected indicates that the Lawrence district is holding more than $5.4 million in reserves, more than enough to absorb the cuts.

But Hayden said the district has been spending down those reserves, and that the Senate leadership plan would effectively wipe out those reserves.

“We were receiving a great deal of criticism from the Legislature because we were carrying too many reserve funds, so we took the cue from them and began spending more and continued to give raises,” he said. “Mainly that’s where it was going to hopefully keep the morale of our employees from imploding.”

“If we were to spend all of our budgeted funds so every department and every building spends everything they’ve been allocated, and they gut us with a $2.75 million decrease this year, it’ll drain our contingency reserve,” Hayden said.

There were signs Wednesday that some in the Senate GOP caucus are not fully behind the leadership bill, especially freshman senators who campaigned saying they wanted to invest more in public schools.

Among those was Sen. Dan Goddard, R-Parsons, who said he has already heard from school districts in his area opposing the Senate leadership plan. Goddard said he thinks the final bill that gets sent to the governor will not look like the Senate leadership bill.

“I think things will change,” he said. “I know we have to balance the Senate bill with the House bill. It’ll probably wind up in a (conference) committee. And I have heard there is a different approach in the House than the Senate.”

Democrats in the Senate have lined up solidly opposed to the plan, and some have said they are not likely to accept any cuts to K-12 education.

“We probably will not,” said Sen. Laura Kelly, of Topeka, the ranking Democrat on the Senate budget committee.