State lawmakers need to write a new formula for funding Kansas schools and close budget gaps in the current and coming fiscal years. As Stephen Koranda reports, they’ll be attacking those issues separately.
Senate leaders are going to take a two-pronged strategy, starting with balancing the Kansas budget. Then they’ll focus on a new school funding formula. The Kansas Supreme Court says the current funding is inadequate.
If lawmakers add more money for schools, the Senate’s majority leader, Jim Denning, says that will be built into the school funding bill.
“The body is going to write a new finance formula, and whatever it looks like, from inputs and outputs, that’ll be inside the finance formula bill,” Denning says.
The top Democrat in the Senate, Anthony Hensley, says he agrees with separating taxes and the budget from school funding, but he’d like to get work started on the K-12 formula now. Lawmakers need to have a new school funding system in place by the end of June.