We have another Action Alert for Wednesday, February 19th in the Senate. Contact your Senator and urge them to oppose SB 47, a blatant attempt by a special interest group to change Kansas school board policy in ways that would make it easier to harass school board members, usurp local authority over school board policies and operations and override the will of local citizens by giving minority members the ability to hijack board operations. We submitted testimony which we’ll share below. Some points you may wish to raise with your Senator include:
This bill was requested by Mike O’Neal on behalf of the Kansas Policy Institute, a private special interest group, and is clearly designed to make it easier for them to market their School Board Resource Center to current school board members.
It requires each school district to send the list of current members and their email addresses to the state department of education (KDSE) and requires KSDE to maintain a *public* database of all current members of the school boards and their email addresses and post it on the KSDE website.
This will make it easier to harass school board members statewide, making it even more difficult to get and retain good school board members.
This bill usurps local control by mandating certain board policies and procedures that appear to make it easier for individual board members to disrupt board meetings and hijack the agenda.
Parents, public and school board members already have avenues to speak at school board meetings and multiple other ways to engage with school board members (email, phone, in-person meetings).
If people don’t like the policies of their local boards can reach out to their elected members to request they enact changes, elect different school board members, or run for the boards themselves. This bill is legislative overreach.
There are good reasons that meetings are run using parliamentary procedures.
The legislature should respect the authority of locally-elected school boards to adopt their own policies and procedures.
https://kslegislature.gov/li/b2025_26/committees/ctte_s_ed_1/misc_documents/download_testimony/ctte_s_ed_1_20250211_04_testimony.html