Topeka ? Gov. Sam Brownback and leaders of the Kansas State Department of Education said Wednesday that they want to hear ideas from the public and education groups about what the state’s next school funding system should look like.

In a letter to dozens of education groups across the state and the general public, Brownback issued an open call for ideas, calling it “an opportunity to help shape the next generation of education in Kansas.

People wishing to offer comments can email the governor’s office at StudentsFirst@ks.gov by Nov. 30.

Their announcement, however, came on the same day that a group of school officials from across the state unveiled the outlines of a plan that they said they’ve been working on for the past 15 months.

Those separate announcements came just three weeks before the Kansas Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a lawsuit that alleges the state’s current level of funding for schools is unconstitutionally low.

They came barely two months before a general election in which school funding will be a central issue in races for all 165 seats in the Kansas Legislature, and four months before the start of the 2017 legislative session when lawmakers are expected to pass a new funding formula.

That formula will direct the spending of at least $4 billion a year in various kinds of school aid, or roughly one half of the entire state general fund budget. Plaintiffs in the school finance lawsuit are seeking an order for at least another $500 million per year.

photo by: Peter Hancock

Gov. Sam Brownback announces that he will work with Kansas State Board of Education Chairman Jim McNiece, left, and Education Commissioner Randy Watson, right, to solicit input from education groups and the public about what a new school funding formula should look like.

“It’s time for us to work together to develop a school funding system that works for Kansas students, for their parents and for educators,” Brownback said.

In 2015, at Brownback’s request, lawmakers repealed the per-pupil funding formula that had been in place since the early 1990s, replacing it for two years with a system of block grants that effectively froze funding in place for all districts.

Brownback said at the time that he wanted lawmakers to spend the next two years developing a new formula. And in his letter Wednesday, he said he does not plan to support an extension of the block grant system for another year.

But little has happened in the 20 months since then because lawmakers were forced to deal instead with a series of budget crises and a Supreme Court order to redistribute existing school funding more equitably.

Asked during a news conference why it took him until now to begin a public dialog on school funding, Brownback said more has been going on behind the scenes.

“We’ve been working a lot. We’ve been doing a lot of things, but also seeing what the (State) Board of Education process is that they’ve done,” he said.

The State Board of Education is an independently elected body that has the constitutional role of supervising K-12 public education in Kansas. The board, in turn, hires the education commissioner who supervises the day-to-day operations of the State Department of Education.

Earlier this year, the department unveiled a new strategic “vision” for schools — “Kansas Can” — that calls for some dramatic changes in the way they do business, as well as the outcomes they are expected to produce.

That vision was the product of a yearlong process led by Education Commissioner Randy Watson that included town hall meetings and listening tours held throughout the state to get public feedback about what people expected from their schools.

State Board of Education Chairman Jim McNiece, a Wichita Republican, said it was important to go through that process before the state even starts to think about a new funding formula.

“From my vantage point, it serves the state much better in the planning process to define what it is that we want than to start the conversation about money,” he said. “I think that’s the fault that we always get into. We start the conversation, and it’s how much is something going to cost, and we really don’t know what we’re buying.”

School administrators plan

photo by: Peter Hancock

Jim Freeman, former chief financial officer for the Wichita school district, is part of a group of school administrators and superintendents who are trying to put together the framework for a new school funding plan that they hope lawmakers will enact in 2017.

Meanwhile, at a separate event elsewhere in Topeka, more than 100 superintendents and local school board members from across the state gathered to have their own discussion about the next funding formula.

Jim Freeman, former chief financial officer for the Wichita school district who is now semi-retired, said he and others had spent the last 15 months working with school officials from across the state to develop a plan that they hope to push through the Legislature next year, in one form or another.

Their plan did not include any mention of how much money should go into a new formula. Freeman said that discussion will occur later, probably after the Supreme Court rules on the finance case.

But it did provide a general outline of how the superintendents and administrators think the money should be distributed, and much of it was based largely on the old formula that lawmakers repealed in 2015.

“We’ve tried to repackage what we thought was best in the old school finance formula and address some of the problems that we saw there,” he said.

The plan would return to funding schools using a base per-pupil formula, with additional weight given to “high need” students, primarily those from lower-income households and those with limited English language proficiency.

But it would not include the old “local option budgets,” the additional money districts could raise on their own through local property taxes. Instead, that money would be folded into each district’s general fund budget as “foundational aid.”

Freeman said the local option budgets were originally intended to provide a way for districts to fund additional programs or expenses, above and beyond what was required by the state. But over the years as school funding failed to keep pace with rising costs, he said, most districts began to use that money to pay for basic operating expenses anyway.

But veterans of the Legislature note that the local option budgets had another political purpose as well. They were needed as part of the overall package adopted in 1992 to secure votes from the wealthy Johnson County suburbs and other areas where lawmakers, and their constituents, wanted to be able to spend more on their schools than was provided through the base formula, which was geared toward the interests of less wealthy parts of the state.

No one from the Lawrence school district was present for Wednesday’s event, which was put together by the Kansas Association of School Boards. District spokeswoman Julie Boyle said that neither Superintendent Kyle Hayden nor board member Shannon Kimball, a regional vice president of KASB, was able to attend.

Freeman acknowledged that even today Johnson County lawmakers may be unwilling to accept a formula that treats their districts exactly like all the others, with no flexibility for them to raise and spend additional money locally if they want.

“I think there’s some room for discussion there,” he said. “These are just rough concepts. This is not a done document. I expect out of this meeting to get some more thoughts and ideas about how that’s going to work.”