Pittsburg school district superintendent Destry Brown testifies before a House committee about a proposed new school funding formula that would add 5 million in additional state funding for schools while requiring more local property taxes in most districts.

Topeka ? Public school officials from across Kansas told a House committee Thursday that they have serious reservations about the latest school funding plan that would add only about $75 million in new state spending while asking most districts to raise their local property taxes.

But the overall amount of funding wasn’t the only concern they raised. Superintendents from a number of districts also said they had concerns about changes it would make in funding for low-income at-risk students, special education funding and career and technical education, to name just a few.

Cory Gibson, superintendent of the Valley Center School District just north of Wichita, pointed out that under current law, the state is supposed to fund 92 percent of the “excess costs” of providing special education services — that is, the additional costs above and beyond what it takes to provide regular education services.

But because special education funding has been frozen in Kansas for a number of years, he said, current funding covers only about 78 percent.

“For Valley Center, that’s over $1 million from our general fund and (local option budget) that is transferred over to cover those costs for students with disabilities,” Gibson said.

Richard Proffitt, superintendent of the Chanute school district in Kansas, said his district is one of many that would lose funding under the House plan, mainly because they have had declining enrollment in recent years.

Proffitt said under the previous formula, which lawmakers discarded in 2015, Chanute was near the upper limit for the amount of additional money it could raise for its local option budget. But under the new proposal, it would have to raise taxes even higher to pay for enhancements such as extracurricular activities.

“I will tell you that in a community like Chanute where we are, let’s say, very tax-sensitive, it would be very difficult for us to realize that,” Proffitt said.

Destry Brown, superintendent of the Pittsburg school district, said nearly all districts in the southeast corner of the state would lose funding under the new proposal. And while declining enrollment accounts for some of that, he said another factor is a reduction for many schools in the funding they would receive to treat low-income “at-risk” students.

Under the old formula, districts were given additional money for every student who qualified for free meals under the National School Lunch Program. But it provided even more money for districts with “high density” populations of at-risk students.

That was intended to address the unique challenges that face urban districts with large concentrations of students living in poverty; districts such as Wichita, Kansas City, Kan., and Topeka.

The idea was based on a cost study performed in the early 2000s by a consulting firm the state had hired, which said that urban poverty is different from rural poverty because in densely populated urban areas, high poverty rates are associated with a number of other social issues that affect students, such as drug trafficking and gang violence.

As the previous formula was written, though, the high-density at-risk funding wasn’t limited to the three major urban centers. It also went to smaller and medium-sized districts that had high levels of poverty.

The new plan would limit high-density at-risk weighting to districts with at least 2,500 students and where 60 percent or more of the students qualify for free lunches.

“I think this is going to push many districts that are small, and in rural areas that are isolated, into having to make very tough decisions,” Brown said.

The committee limited testimony Thursday to people who had traveled long distances to be at the hearing and who could not return at a later date.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Larry Campbell, R-Olathe, said the hearings would continue Friday, and may extend into Monday before the panel begins working on the bill and considering amendments.

Campbell has said his goal is to advance a final version of the bill to the full House before lawmakers adjourn the regular part of the 2017 session on April 7. They will return three weeks later, on May 1, to begin the final wrap-up portion of the session.