ReRoute the Roadmap: Consolidation no solution for rural Kansans

From ReRoute the Roadmap. We agree that rural Kansans are entitled to a strong public education, too.

Mark writes to us in response to the question, “Has the legislature looked at any consolidation ideas to reduce administrative costs for school systems?”:

It’s also helpful to note that those thinly populated areas of the state where consolidation has been accomplished still suffer from an absence of the economies of scale that taxpayers and school children enjoy in Sedgwick and Johnson Counties. They are, however, citizens of Kansas and therefore entitled to “adequate” funding. It is more expensive per pupil to provide a curriculum that covers all the bases for children in a district that has a high school with 250 students, than it is to provide that same curriculum to a high school with 1,200 students, but the small school students have the same right to a good education as the big school students do. What voters in this state need to be told and shown is that good public services, the kinds of services they demand for their children, but wish not to pay for once their chicks have flown the coop, cost money, and quality costs more than crap. The delusional notion that conservatives pass around that these services are provided by nothing but greedy, self-interested “tax-eaters” who pad positions and their wallets while extorting the solid, hard-working but witless taxpayers is foul, easily rebutted, and a major responsibility of those of us who seek to “reroute the roadmap.”

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