More School Funding Stuff

This is how these things go. Last week the Kansas Senate passed a revised budget that would have limited the cuts to public K-12 education. Now the bill is in the House, and on Friday that chamber's appropriations committee brought forward an alternative bill that would slash school funding in a fashion similar to the original senate bill.

To better understand all these bills, it might be easiest to look at them in terms of how much money would be cut from the "base state aid per pupil" BSAPP. This is the amount of money that the state of Kansas pays districts for each student enrolled in their schools.

Under the governor's budget, schools would loose about $22/student. The bill that came out of the Senate ways and means committee would have cut about $117/student. The compromised bill which passed the Senate last week would have cut $33/student. The bill now moving to the floor of the house would cut $88/student.

To do the math, consider that our school district has about 1400 students. The total base amount cut from the district's budget, then, can be calculated by multiplying the BSAPP by 1400. Keep in mind that this is a simple way to compare these plans. Many of the proposed cuts would actually cut significantly more since reducing the BSAPP also reduces the amounts that districts can collect through sources such as the local options budget or new facilities weighting.