photo by: USD 497 screenshot

The Lawrence school board meets at district offices at its meeting on Oct. 24, 2022.

The Lawrence school board has approved its legislative priorities, which emphasize the need to increase special education funding, address barriers to teacher recruitment and retention, and speak out against state efforts to usurp local control over curriculum and instruction.

The school board voted 5-0, with board members Kelly Jones and Kay Emerson absent, to approve the priorities as part of its meeting Monday. School Board President Shannon Kimball said the statement highlights those three issues by putting statements about each at the top of the document, and then going into more detail about the issues later.

“We wrote some summary language around those things to try to highlight them,” Kimball said. “…It’s meant to be an executive summary of the high level things that we wanted to really focus on.”

The board’s legislative priority statement comes as the school district prepares for debate to continue about school funding and what is taught in classrooms. The priority about local control relates to recent proposals at the state level, such as the so-called Parents’ Bill of Rights, as well as components of the Kansas Senate substitute for House Bill 2567, which contains various funding and policy provisions. Other recent state proposals have included restrictions on transgender athletes and vouchers to funnel money away from public schools. Funding for special education has also been a key topic of debate.

More specifically, the board’s statement calls on the state to fully fund special education according to state law, to increase the base funding for school districts to help fund competitive teacher wages that match pay for similarly educated professionals, and to reject calls for the state to control classroom instruction and teaching practices. The exact language of the three issues highlighted by the legislative statement is as follows:

•Fully fund special education at the required 92% of excess cost. See K.S.A 72-3422

•Solve the teacher recruitment and retention crisis by increasing school district funding (specifically base state aid per pupil) to provide sufficient funds to allow districts to close the 25% educator pay gap and to pay competitive wages to support staff.

•Value the instructional expertise of educators and the governance expertise of district leaders by prioritizing and protecting local control. Reject calls to proscribe management and teaching practices and procedures in statute. Flexibility at the district level to respond to local circumstances and implement best practices based on those circumstances is essential to achieving the educational outcomes our educational leaders expect and our students and families deserve.

Later in the document, another statement more specifically speaks to local control regarding curriculum, stating: Lawrence public schools believes that a district’s curriculum should be established by the local board of education, not by state statute.

Superintendent Anthony Lewis said another bullet point added to the statement served to emphasize the importance of teacher recruitment and retention and the role of respecting teachers in that effort. The statement reads as follows: Lawrence Public Schools urges the legislature to acknowledge that the educator recruitment and retention crisis is primarily attributable to staff pay and to the lack of respect and support for educators expressed by state and community leaders and parents.

Another change to is to have the district’s statement reference its equity policy. Lewis said that the reference was included due to intentions around the state to derail some of those efforts.

The board began the discussion on Oct. 10, which was earlier than usual, with the goal of being more prepared to represent the district’s positions ahead of what district leadership expects to be a potentially impactful legislative session. The legislative session will begin in January. The full legislative priority statement is available in the board’s agenda packet on the school district’s website, usd497.org.

In other business, the board:

•Received a report about the district’s equity efforts. The report included academic assessment and discipline data broken down by race as well as information about district efforts to address disparities and support historically marginalized students. The board has asked for concrete action to address disparities in achievement, and Monday’s report was a quarterly update related to the district’s equity goals.

•After meeting in executive session, the board voted 4-0, with Jones, Emerson and Carole Cadue-Blackwood absent, to accept the recommendation of the appeal hearing officer. The board called a special meeting on Oct. 12 to appoint Lewis as the appeal hearing officer for a student’s suspension or expulsion appeal. No other details were shared about the nature of the recommendation.