The Northeast Johnson County Conservatives are trying to make sense of school finance in Kansas with a little help.
On Tuesday, the group hosted an event led by Dave Trabert, president of the Kansas Policy Institute. He told 41 Action News many people are not well-informed about school funding due to misinformation.
"For example, they were told all last year that school funding was being cut with the block grants. That was never true," Trabert said. "In the last school year 2015, about 53 cents of every dollar provided to schools actually went to instruction."
Neil Melton, chair of the Northeast Johnson County Conservatives, agreed. "There's a big, I think, disconnect sometimes between public perception on what the state has put into education funding and what the reality actually is. It's very important that we have good schools, but we also need to understand it's not just how much money is going in. It's how the money is being spent and what kind of decisions are being made with that money."
Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools is one of four districts who sued over the state funding formula, claiming it underserved poorer districts. The court agreed and gave Kansas a June 30 deadline to pass an equitable formula and fund it or face school shutdowns.
Trabert says the gap was small and "it's a big ludicrous for the court to be threatening to close schools over less than one percent of state funding."
KCKPS has a higher per student cost, according to Trabert. "They're doing $15,700 where Shawnee Mission for example is about $3,000 dollars per pupil less than that.."
One site that hosts school finance information for every district in the state backs up that claim.
"It's important that we get different perspectives on what's going on in education finance," Melton believes. "Equity isn't just about funding. Equity is about outcomes."
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Dia Wall can be reached at dia.wall@kshb.com.
