In today’s education interim committee meeting, they addressed special education. It is a complex topic, and the confusion among the committee members showed that this would have been better handled by the task force created by the Kansas legislature last session. At the end of today’s meeting, we had one legislator mistakenly referring to phantom teachers (not understanding a district’s teacher count starts as an estimate based on last year’s numbers but is reconciled with actual numbers in June and any necessary funding adjustments made in the June payment). Another legislator didn’t understand that the SPED formula is in statute (under legislative control) and not agency policy. Another point that didn’t seem to be understood is that the formula isn’t perfect but the overfunded districts are small, and the larger districts are underfunded. You could take all of the overfunding, and it would not equal the underfunding of a single large district. This would have been a more fruitful discussion with all of the task force members at a table instead of select conferees in front of the committee for a single day. They also need to stop asking statewide personnel or representatives of particular districts questions about other districts.

Watch the video and see Rep. Williams explaining the need for the SPED task force to support passage of HB 2060. The task force became law at the end of the 2023 legislative session, and members have been appointed. Rep. Williams is responsible for calling the first meeting but has opted not to do so.

Originally published on Facebook on Oct. 9, 2023.