Kansas lawmakers nearing deal on school funding

Members of the school finance conference committee are, clockwise from bottom left, Sens. Carolyn McGinn, Jim Denning and Anthony Hensley, and Reps. Ed Trimmer, Larry Campbell and Clay Aurand.

? House and Senate negotiators came close Saturday to reaching agreement on a new school funding plan that would phase in a roughly $280 million increase in K-12 funding over the next two years.

During conference committee talks Saturday, Senate negotiators agreed to accept the House’s plan to raise base per-pupil aid to $4,006 for the upcoming year, and then to $4,128 in the following year.

The Senate also accepted the House’s position to add 48.4 percent to those amounts for each student who qualifies for free lunch, money that is referred to as “at-risk weighting” because poverty is considered a key factor in determining whether a student is at risk of failing or dropping out of school.

Members of the school finance conference committee are, clockwise from bottom left, Sens. Carolyn McGinn, Jim Denning and Anthony Hensley, and Reps. Ed Trimmer, Larry Campbell and Clay Aurand.

Both of those concessions put more money into the two-year plan than the Senate had in its original bill.

At the same time, however, the Senate threw in two new issues that House negotiators said they needed to think about overnight: a cap on the statewide total amount of bonded debt that school districts can have; and an expansion of a controversial program that offers tax credits for contributions to scholarship funds that enable some public school students to attend private schools.

Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning, R-Overland Park, said Kansas school districts now have in excess of $6 billion in outstanding bonded debt, a figure he said has been rising at a rate of about 11 percent a year.

Currently, the decision to issue bonds is made by local school boards, but it’s an additional cost to the state, which must provide “equalization aid” so that poor districts don’t have to levy significantly higher property taxes than wealthier districts to raise the same amount of money to pay off those bonds.

Denning’s proposal would cap the total amount of school bonds at its peak of about $6 billion, which was set last year. Going forward, the State Department of Education would have to approve any new bond issues, and the amount could not exceed the amount of principal paid on bonds the previous year.

If the volume of requests exceeds the amount of new bonding available in any given year, the department would give the highest priority to bonds for projects needed for safety or handicapped accessibility. The next priority would be projects needed to accommodate enrollment growth, then projects to improve educational programs, and finally projects aimed at reducing energy consumption.

“We just want to stop the growth,” Denning said. “We want to cap it at the high mark and hopefully start reducing it.”

The Senate also proposed expanding the scholarship program. Currently, for-profit corporations can earn a 70 percent tax credit for contributions they make to private school scholarship funds, with a maximum of $10 million in credits allowed in a single year.

The Senate plan would expand that by allowing individuals to get the same credit when they contribute to those funds, and the maximum amount anyone could contribute in a year would be set at $500,000. In addition, private schools receiving those funds would have to file reports with the state about their meals, transportation and classroom costs.

The original House plan called for expanding the number of public schools from which students could qualify for the scholarships to include the 100 lowest-performing schools in the state. It also proposed requiring that the private schools receiving those students either be accredited by the state or meet other academic performance measurements.

Critics of that plan have said it’s unfair because people who contribute to a fund supporting public schools, like the Lawrence Schools Foundation, only get to deduct that amount from their taxable income, while contributions to a private school fund are given a more generous tax credit, which is a direct reduction in the amount of taxes one owes.

John Robb, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the school finance lawsuit now before the Kansas Supreme Court, said the scholarship program has not been a focus of the lawsuit so far, but he said if lawmakers expand it, the plaintiffs may challenge it when the Supreme Court reviews the new plan.

House negotiators said they would take those offers under advisement. The conference committee is scheduled to meet again at 1 p.m. Sunday, which will mark the 107th day of the session. The longest session in state history was in 2015 when it lasted 114 days.

Neither the House nor Senate raised the issue of reinstating teacher tenure rights on Saturday, something that was mentioned briefly Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders have said the are still debating whether or not to add a tax provision to the bill that would raise the additional money needed to fund it. That would be a separate tax bill from the one lawmakers will need to fill the nearly $1 billion revenue shortfall the state faces over the next two years for the rest of state government.