Heather’s walking to Topeka March 28-31! Many of you first met us last March when Game On member Heather Ousley walked the 60 miles from Kansas City to Topeka to voice opposition to the policies and priorities of many in our legislature. This session we have seen continued underfunding of our schools. We have a court decision to fix unconstitutional inequities in our school funding which has been met by reluctance and a poisonous bill bundling funding with toxic education policy. Many legislators have shown us their relief over the Gannon remand of the adequacy issues, which they...
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New House appropriations bill still not public, believed to contain toxic education policy and some changes to charter law
“Republican leaders in the Kansas House on Friday said they didn’t intend to include an expansion of charter schools as part of a school funding bill intended to address the Supreme Court’s ruling on school finance. And while they said they intend to introduce a new bill without the charter school provision, education groups said they still have major concerns about other provisions of the bill, such as merit-based pay for teachers, changes in teacher licensing requirements and offering corporate tax breaks for funding private school scholarships.” http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2014/mar/21/charter-school-provision-mistake-gop-leaders-admit/ We haven’t seen the new bill, but it sounds like there will...
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Leave a Comment Merrick now says appropriations bill was not supposed to include broad changes to charter law and new bill is being drafted
Now Speaker Merrick is saying the appropriations bill was not supposed to contain the charter provisions, and a new appropriations bill is being drafted. See http://www.kansas.com/2014/03/21/3358868/house-speaker-wont-allow-charter.html But that seems inconsistent with what he said in this morning’s edition of the Wichita Eagle: “’If we’re going to spend that money, we’ve got to get some policy stuff. To me, that’s only logical,’ said House Speaker Ray Merrick, R-Stilwell, shortly after the bill was introduced. . . . Merrick called the 91-page bill a ‘work in progress and a starting point’ and said he expected additions to be made and some...
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Leave a Comment Letter: Kansans should reclaim their power
This letter offers great advice for Kansans who care about public education in our state. I think that those Kansans who are unhappy about legislative actions should stop complaining in private unless they are willing to take action themselves. Ours is a state with a proud history of populism. We the people are not powerless. We can speak and we can tell our leaders what we want and what we value. But there is only one way that ordinary Kansans will be heard in Topeka: through the ballot box and through personal involvement. There was a common slogan in...
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