Kansas school spending lobby impossible to satisfy

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A new report by the Kansas Policy Institute provides some insight into the voracious appetite of the Kansas school spending lobby for taxpayer dollars: There’s never enough.

In A Kansas Primer on Education Funding, Volume III: Analysis of K-12 Spending in Kansas this story is told:

So the rumors of school funding wars persist, with legislators and taxpayers asking “how much is enough?” and schools pressing for more money with no real end in sight. Speaker Pro Tem Arlen Siegfreid (R-Olathe) shared with me a conversation he had with Mark Tallman, Assistant Executive Director/Advocacy for the Kansas Association of School Boards (KASB), which illuminates the dynamics at play:

Early last session Mark Tallman and I engaged in a conversation about the budget and school spending. During the conversation the difficulty of increasing school spending as ‘required’ by Montoy was juxtaposed against the need to cut school spending by the same percentage as other portions of the State budget. During our discussion I asked Mr. Tallman if we (the State) had the ability to give the schools everything he asked for would he still ask for even more money for schools. His answer was, “Of course, that’s my job.”

We’ve known for some time that the appetite for money by the school spending lobby can’t be satisfied. In 2007, when the Wichita school board voted to raise taxes I wrote this:

Lynn Rogers, then the USD 259 (the Wichita public school district) school board president, and Connie Dietz, then vice-president of the same body, attended. There had been a proposal to spend an additional $415 million over the next three years on schools. Asked if this would be enough to meet their needs, the Wichita school board members replied, “No.”

At least Rogers was not lying. Much more Kansas state spending than that was approved, and true to his word, the Wichita Board of Education still found it necessary this week to raise taxes so the public schools could have even more money.

Comments

3 responses to “Kansas school spending lobby impossible to satisfy”

  1. Anonymous

    Besides Tallman, there’s Mark Desetti, lobbyist for the teachers’ union. Both should be ignored. Scorned would be better.

  2. […] a one cent increase? Why not three or four cents? Or ten cents on the dollar? As we’ve seen, no amount of increased spending will satisfy the school spending lobby, at least not until all private sector wealth is transferred to the […]

  3. T.Y. So

    How is the bill to bring Kansas into the 20th, yes the 20th century, concerning unilateral annexation? Only two states left have this robbery of rural land for city tax bases. Wait until those redneck rural people rise up. The school issues will be dwarfed.

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