Author Spotlight
For over 30 years, Jim Sullinger covered the Kansas Legislature for the Kansas City Star. In his time in Topeka, he followed the state education budget closely, as it was one of the issues readers cared the most deeply about. Even for a veteran reporter, the current state of the education budget is shocking.
“This is the worst I’ve seen in the 30 years that I’ve watched it.” Sullinger said. “From what we can gather, I have never seen budgets that cut so much out of education. We’ve never seen this drastic of a reduction before.”
Governor Sam Brownback proposed cutting the base state aid per pupil (BSAPP) by $75 this year and $151 for the 2011-2012 school year or fiscal year (FY) 2012. BSAPP is a set amount of funding allotted by legislators each year for each full-time student in Kansas. Based on numbers from the Kansas Department of Education, Kansas’s BSAPP increased marginally mid-decade, but in the past few years it has been reduced to cope with budget stress.
Brownback’s Communications Director and Press Secretary Sherriene Jones-Sontag said that since education makes up 53 percent of the state budget, cuts in that area are unavoidable. Even with the Governor considering cuts in “pretty much every state agency,” deep education cuts will still be implemented. She described the situation of the state’s education budget as similar to a student working with a limited income.
“It’s kind of like as a high school student, you have a part time job—if you’re only able to work on Saturday as opposed to working both Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday night, you’re going to have less money coming in,” Jones-Sontag said. “Then you’re going to have less money to spend.”
Jones-Sontag cited the since-blocked proposed elimination of the Kansas Arts Commission and proposal to cut PBS funding as examples of the Governor looking for areas aside from education in which to make cuts. Eliminating the KAC would have saved $500,000 and eliminating PBS funding from the state would save $1.6 million.
According to Jones-Sontag, both of those expenditures, while they have merit, are not given high priority in the Governor’s office in the current economic climate.
“When you have the money, when the economy’s strong and revenues are strong, it’s good and nice to be able to do those types of programs,” Jones-Sontag said. “But when your funding is decreasing and your spending is limited, you have to set priorities.”
The Kansas Legislature reconvenes on April 27, at which point debate with continue on budget plans in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Senate’s current proposal would reduce BSAPP by $33, while the House’s more aggressive plan would cut it $88.
Sullinger said that the way for the legislature and the governor to avoid such drastic education cuts would be to look to raise taxes to generate revenue.
“Severe cuts of some kind are inevitable, if you do not raise taxes,” Sullinger said. “If you decide you’re not going to raise taxes or you’re not going to increase income anywhere, then the scale of the state’s deficit forces you to probably do as much as they’re proposing to do.”
Kansas State Senator for District 7 Terrie Huntington said that there is no chance either chamber of the Kansas legislature will move to raise taxes to cope with the tight budget. In fact, she said the idea has not even been considered or brought up for debate. While she did support the one cent sales tax increase passed last year that raised $330 million, she does not feel that raising taxes is a good option right now.
“The legislature isn’t interested, I’m not interested and I don’t think the taxpayers are interested,” Huntington said.
But what Huntington reports she and her constituents are interested in is the ability to choose to pay more taxes to support local schools through the local option budget. The local option budget, which Sullinger calls the “saving grace for Shawnee Mission,” is a strategy for raising school funds in which property taxes are increased and the funds raised benefit local school districts directly.
Sullinger said that although many Kansans are concerned by cuts in education, few are informed enough about the way school financing actually takes place. And in Sullinger’s experience, this can lead to confusion and frustration with legislators when people feel like their district or interest group was treated poorly.
“There’s an old saying that school finance is like a Russian novel,” Sullinger said. “It’s extremely complicated, nobody understands it and in the end everyone dies.”
Despite all the recent community debate that has occurred in the SMSD, Huntington has received very little feedback from her constituents about the choices being made about the education budget. She does not attribute this to lack of interest, but rather to a sense in the community that cuts are a storm that must be weathered due to the current economic problems facing the state and nation.
“It’s finally sinking in,” Huntington said. “People are aware that the economy has been in a slump and income tax is down, revenues are down and everybody, including our city and county governments, are making cuts. They understand those cuts are finally sinking down to our local school districts.”
Photos by Lindsey Hartnett
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