What's Lost In The Spring Ritual Arguing Over Education Funding

By C.J. Janvoy, Kansas Reflector

March 3, 2021

Epic battles over education funding are, I guess, a rite of spring in Kansas.

Soon, lawmakers will consider the Orwellian-sounding Student Empowerment Act, which one legislator called a “Frankenstein bill,” its various pieces stitched together mostly out of enthusiasm for diverting taxpayer money to private school vouchers.

One reason this battle’s so epic is because it’s about more than education. It’s about values, and Statehouse deciders, which is to say a lot of Republicans currently rolling in their supermajority glory, seem obsessed with keeping kids away from whatever scary reality is implied by anything “public.”

It’s the kind of political battle that feels more and more cruel the farther one gets from Topeka.
“I am deeply troubled by what appears to be the attitude of the Legislature toward the efforts our public schools are making in Kansas to serve our students,” Brian Leighty told lawmakers in testimony against HB2119 last month.

He’s a farmer in Lane County whose three daughters attend public school in Dighton, where he’s also a school board member.

“My daughters are no different than any other student in Kansas,” Leighty said. “All students deserve a quality education, and I am proud to say that I support the extraordinary efforts of our schools to provide them a quality education, particularly during these trying times.”

These trying times.

“Finney and Ford counties, with the meatpacking plants, were two of the hardest hit in the springtime when we first went into lockdown,” Garden City High School Principal Steve Nordby, who also testified against the bill, told me last week. “We were among the leaders nationally as far as cases for quite a while.”

In his town of 26,000 people, nearly everyone was affected by the coronavirus.

“You almost couldn’t avoid it,” he said. “We had a number of deaths. Even if they weren’t in immediate families, this is a close-knit community. A lot of folks are having to deal with all of that.”

Right now, Garden City High School’s 190 employees, 115 of whom are teachers, are just trying to keep everyone safe.

The building opened for in-person learning in August. They went to a hybrid model for a couple of weeks in November and then full remote in December. All students — nearly 2,000 kids — have been back since the new semester began in January.

The disruption played out in different ways.

“We noticed some of our kids flourished,” Nordby said. “But some really kind of fell off — the motivation wasn’t there, they struggled understanding some of the content without typical interaction with the teacher, it was a little tough through the screen.”

The first two weeks of January, they focused on remediation, stretching the learning for kids who’d done well, filling the gaps for those who didn’t.

And Nordby has experience filling in gaps. He’s seen it in non-pandemic times when kids leave public school for private schools or online learning, only to come back in a semester or two having fallen behind their peers.

“That’s sometimes a difficult conversation with families and you really do feel for the kid in that situation,” he said.

Their issues have mainly been with online schooling.

“There’s a lot of different vendors out there and there’s not a lot of consistency,” he said.

He’s not knocking private and online schools.

“It works tremendously for some families,” Nordby said.

But like other opponents of HB2119, Nordby is concerned about diverting public funds from schools like his, who have to serve all kids, to private schools that lack accountability when it comes to taxpayer money.

Families in the Garden City district come from 28 nations and speak more than 20 languages. More than 30% of his students are English language learners and more than 60% are economically disadvantaged.

“In Garden City, we’ve got a lot of first-generation college students, first generation high school graduates,” he said. “So it’s always great to see those kids achieve, and see the pride that families have with those kids when they get that college acceptance, when they get that college scholarship, when they get that workplace certification and are able to be set up for a successful future.”

Witnessing how happy students were to be back in school in August, their resilience and determination — and that of his staff — taught him something about his community.

“The thing that struck me has really been the determination of all of our stakeholders and how important the role of the school is. Not just the educational piece, but as a pillar in our community as far as the social structure,” he said.

“I think there’s great power in the work that we do,” Nordby said.

I suspect that’s what some lawmakers fear the most.