Kansas Public Schools And The Supreme Court

Here we go again. The Supreme Court of Kansas has ruled, once again, that the Republican dominated Kansas legislature has failed the public schools in Kansas by refusing to properly fund them.

The Supreme Court ruled in February of this year that the state is not adequately funding the schools, and the legislature pretended to fix the problem. The court has now ruled that an acceptable budget for schools must be passed and in place by June 30, or schools must remain closed. The schools must remain closed? That seems like a tall order in a country where all children under the age of sixteen years are legally obligated to attend school, except in rare cases wherein children have graduated early. It seems much more likely that Kansas public schools could go into receivership.

The crux of the issue here is the distribution of funds between richer and poorer school districts. Kansas, in an ongoing effort to resist Brown vs. the Board of Education, continues to craft its geographic school districts in a deliberately unequal manner. The Kansas legislature could easily remedy this by consolidating schools, county by county, eliminating the need for multiple school boards and multiple administrations within a county. All of the counties and their school boards would answer to a central authority, the state. This would save money, and make equitable distribution much more possible. If the Kansas legislature would just accept this, and stop resisting the Constitution, the Supreme Court would not have any reasons to stop public schools in Kansas from opening in August for the school year of 2016-2017.

Kansas Public Schools Are All At Risk

Kansas is in denial. It seems that U.S. Department of Education has taken notice of the fact that Kansas schools like to hang on to incompetent teachers, despite any high failure rates among their students, and keep their insular, ridicules social fishbowls intact, rather than terminating the contracts and careers of those who were not born to teach, in favor of hiring real teachers who can educate our children. Because of this, the state of Kansas is in danger of losing it's No Child Left Behind waiver. Not that No Child Left Behind has been wonderful or great, or even satisfactory; but there is a school principal in Frankfort, Kansas, who actually encourages his special education teacher for grades three through six to deliberately impede any learning done by the young people in her class, because the minute those children catch up to their peers, the school stops receiving extra funding. This school also has a much higher percentage of special education "cases" than most public schools in other states.......there are about one hundred and ten students in the school, and at least thirty of them have special education services. If this is an example of how Kansas funds it's public schools, and we should all hope it isn't, then it's truly no big surprise that the U.S. Department of Education is now taking notice. Your tax dollars at work, Kansas. It is well past time to consolidate the schools and lose the small, "unified" districts that are not accountable to anyone for teaching our children.