The House of Representatives chamber of the Kansas Statehouse is pictured July 23, 2014 in Topeka.

Topeka ? A Kansas House committee reached a general agreement Thursday night on a new school funding plan that closely resembles the one lawmakers repealed two years ago, but which would add roughly $150 million in new funding.

The K-12 Education Budget Committee plans to finish its work Monday when lawmakers return from a three-day weekend, but most of the contours of the plan were agreed to Thursday night, several hours after other members of the House and Senate had already left Topeka.

The bill would provide each district in Kansas with base funding of $4,170 per pupil, with many of the same weighting factors under the old formula that provide additional money for students who are more expensive to teach.

That compares to the $3,852 in base state aid per pupil that the state spent the last time it used a per-pupil funding formula in the 2014-2015 school year.

The total spending in the bill is about double what was originally proposed when the bill was unveiled last week. The big question that lawmakers will have to consider when it reaches the full House is whether that will be enough to satisfy the Kansas Supreme Court, which recently ruled that current funding levels are unconstitutionally inadequate.

“I think it’s the intent of the committee to put more money in over time,” Rep. Jim Karleskint, R-Tonganoxie, said. “The plaintiffs (in the school funding lawsuit), I think, were expecting three or four hundred million off the bat. I think it’s the consensus of folks on the committee that we’re going to work towards that, but going in $150 million increments.”

Rep. Ed Trimmer of Winfield, the ranking Democrat on the panel, agreed that it will take a multi-year effort to satisfy the court.

“I think we’re going to have to guarantee that for five years. I know it’s incumbent upon each Legislature to appropriate change, but I think the court would retain jurisdiction,” Trimmer said. “The Department of Education and the state school board told us that to fund their initiatives it would be over $800 million. If we do $150 million for five years, that’s $750 million.”

In addition to the base funding amount, the bill would also provide for a form of “local option budget,” or LOB, that allows districts to raise additional money on their own for enhanced programs.

Unlike under current law, though, districts would not have to seek voter approval to raise their LOBs to that level, although voters who oppose raising the LOB could circulate protest petitions to force a public vote.

It also fully funds all-day kindergarten in those districts that offer it by counting each of those children as one regular, full-time equivalent student, and it provides additional funding for preschool programs for low-income children.

Karleskint also added amendments to provide $800,000 for a teacher mentoring program, which pairs up young teachers with more experienced teachers as a method of preventing those young educators from leaving the profession.

He also added $1.7 million for teacher professional development.

The final bill is vastly different from the one the committee started working from last week. That bill, authored mainly by Rep. Clay Aurand, R-Belleville, contained a more complicated formula that would have required local districts to raise nearly 20 percent of the total “foundation” aid through local property taxes.

Over the course of several hours Thursday, though, the committee took that formula apart, piece by piece, replacing it with provisions that were much more similar to the formula that had been in place since the early 1990s.

Many of the amendments that return the bill to something similar to the old formula passed in the closely-divided committee on 9-7 votes.

The committee intends to finish details of the bill on Monday, including a technical change in a formula that calculates transportation aid for school districts. Members of the committee also said there may be an attempt at one more amendment to increase the base aid amount.

Lawmakers are scheduled to adjourn the regular part of the session on Friday, April 7. They will then take a three-week break while they wait for new, updated revenue estimates to be released on April 20.

They will return May 1 for the start of the wrap-up session, where one of their major tasks will be to pass a final, “omnibus” budget bill that would include K-12 school funding, and presumably a tax bill, in order to balance the budget with the new revenue estimates.

The Senate has appointed a similar committee to focus on a new funding formula, but it is not expected to build its own version of a plan from scratch. Members of that panel have said they will wait for the House to pass a plan, and work from that bill.