SMSD Superintendent Dr. Michael Schumacher announced during the Board of Education Financial Report on March 25 that the district isn’t adding any of the 113.3 Building Needs Assessment requested full-time positions including interventionists, Information Technology IT specialists, teacher instructional coaches and elementary counselors, according to SMSD Board recaps.
“This was very hard to do,” Schumacher said, in an address to the SMSD Board of Education. “The topic of adding counselors is a very passionate topic, but hopefully our community can understand that while we want to add these positions and add counselors, we aren’t able to do that at this time.”
The district said the decision comes after declining enrollment and decreased state funding. For the 2025-26 school year, the district lost over $4 million due to a sudden drop in enrollment of over 250 students across the district, according to Schumacher.
With increased cost of living in Johnson County, families have been moving to other parts of Kansas and leaving SMSD, according to Schumacher. Over the past four years, the cost of owning a single-family home in Johnson County has risen 27%, from $330,000 to $451,000, according to an article from the Johnson County government.
Many students and families are also concerned with sending their kids to school, Title 1 schools specifically, with the ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in Kansas City, according to Schumacher.
The district also had to transfer $25 million to accommodate a decrease in state funding for special education, which left few funds to be allocated for new positions, Schumacher said.
“As we're making decisions about adding positions, in particular, [for] counselors, we need to be able to predict that we're going to be able to continue those positions in years to come,” Schumacher said. “With all that being said, all of those factors, we didn't think it was a year in which we should be taking a step out and adding new positions.”
Of the many positions requested by the cumulative Building Needs Assessments, 34 counselors were requested to be added at elementary schools across the district.
Most SMSD elementary schools haven’t had counselors in over ten years, Belinder Elementary School Principal Steve Yeoman said. However, most of the social and emotional needs are being met by district allocated social workers, at least in the case of Belinder, according to Yeoman.
“I’ve been here for 12 years at Belinder, and we've never had a counselor at our school,” Yeoman said. “I think that it's fair to say that the social emotional learning component of what we do has remained pressing, certainly post COVID, so that may be a driver for some people to feel that there's an additional need for counselors.”
SMSD did decide to add five in-building substitutes to district elementary schools.
The majority of the substitute teachers in the district come from a pool of Kelly Education employees, a staffing company that has an SMSD contract negotiated every year, according to SM East Building Sub Kristen Ekvall.
Currently, all six high schools in SMSD have two building substitute teachers, one as part of the Kelly contract and one hired directly from the district, which arose from COVID-19 district changes, Ekvall said.
“I think with the building subs, you get people that know the kids, and they know how the school runs,” Ekvall. “I feel like [during the COVID-19 pandemic] teachers realized that they deserve to take [time off]. If they needed to take their time during that period and going past COVID, they used it more.”
Other positions the district didn’t add included interventionists, Information Technology IT specialists and teacher instructional coaches. These decisions are just for the 2026-27 school year and could be subject to change in the coming years, according to Schumacher.
“People understand the numbers that we're putting out there,” Schumacher said. “I mean, they're factual numbers and the logic is there, but it doesn't mean that people aren't frustrated and wish we could do something different. [Not adding additional counselors] bothers me because we want to do everything we can to support our students and I know counselors would help us.”
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