Kansas Governor Sam Brownback announces School Efficiency Task Force

Recently, Governor Sam Brownback announced the formation of the School Efficiency Task Force to examine school spending and to develop guidelines on how to get more funding into the classroom where teachers teach and students learn.

“Providing a quality education to the children of Kansas is one of the core functions of state government and will remain a top funding priority for my administration,” Governor Brownback said.

“It is critically important for state policy makers to be confident that state resources for education are spent as efficiently and effectively as possible. We must ensure that classroom teachers have the resources they need to educate effectively. We need more money in the classroom and less in administration and overhead costs.”

While task force members are researching and analyzing where inefficiencies are occurring in our educational system, they also want to hear from Kansans who interact with the educational system on a daily basis and have examples of inefficiency that they have witnessed or experienced: students, parents, involved citizens, teachers and administrators.

Kansans can share their firsthand experiences by completing and submitting the below form. It may be filled out anonymously or with contact information in the event the task force would like to follow up for more specific information.

Contact Information

Thank you for taking the time to give us your input to improve the educational opportunities for our students. The fields below are optional and would only be used in the event that we needed to follow up for more specific information about the inefficiency or inefficiencies you are reporting.

This should be very interesting. I’ll bet parents have a lot of eye-opening things to say.

Try cutting down on the number of school districts. This state has about 1% of all school students in the country, but 2% of the total number of school districts. There are hundreds of rural districts with a few hundred students that could be consolidated saving millions. And the larger counties are no better; Johnson County doesn’t need 5 separate districts with 5 district staffs and all that administration.

I could agree to a degree, but the fact of the matter is, by consolidating rural schools, it would put some kids 40 miles from the nearest attendance center. Just something to think about.

I could agree to a degree, but the fact of the matter is, by consolidating rural schools, it would put some kids 40 miles from the nearest attendance center. Just something to think about.

Not necessarily. If School District A has 3 schools and School District B has 3 schools then why wouldn't School District AB have 6 schools but half the administrative overhead?

Just a few issue’s here:
1. Most small schools out here don’t employee a principle. It would be mandated to hire a principle to cover the smaller attendance centers.
2. Its been the habit of schools that do this to eventually close the small attendance centers after a few years because of high costs. Busing then becomes the issue.
3. The superintendent of the larger district will see a substantial increase in his/her salary.
4. High School students would be mandated to go to the larger attendance center leaving an elementary school and possible a Jr. High, but I doubt that the later would be possible and the Jr. High would be taken to the larger attendance center. After a few years the elementary school would be closed and all students would be bused.

My conclusion, no real savings are seen.

The only savings I would see are larger classrooms and less teachers after the other attendance centers are closed. An interesting case is a school district called Triplains (Winona) located in Logan County. They are one of the smallest schools in the state and if they were to close, some of those kids would be bused I’m guessing 50 miles to Oakley, Sharon Springs Leoti, or Brewster.

It might be an option in some cases but it would have to be done on a case by case deal. I still don’t think there would be much savings at all, at lease out west, the more populated centers in NE Kansas might be different.

The state of Kansas provides roughly $3900 in funding per pupil for the Shawnee Mission school district where my kids attended. For a rural school district like Dexter the state provides over $10,000 per pupil in funding. In both cases administration and non-instructional student support cost about $2000 per pupil. The number of rural districts is inefficient. If economies can be found by consolidating school districts and reducing the administration and support costs then the state should do so.

http://www.ksde.org/Portals/0/School%20Finance/data_warehouse/total_expenditures/d0512exp.pdf

Here is the same thing but for every school district in kansas, I find it interesting.

http://www.ksde.org/Portals/0/School%20Finance/data_warehouse/total_expenditures/AllUSDs.pdf

Years ago, before the first law suit, The Department of Ed. put a suggestion page on the web site for schools to suggest savings that could be used. Blue Valley had one that encouraged schools to lower the temperature of their pool. LOL
I’ll bet John Vratil figured that one out LOL.