Kansas policymakers lag on updating public school funding formula

Kansas budget director Adam Proffitt is a nonvoting member of the state's Education Funding Task Force. He appears here at a press conference on April 20, 2026, at the Statehouse. (Photo by Anna Kaminski/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — A Kansas task force is running out of time to craft a new public school funding formula, which the Legislature and the state’s next governor must agree upon before the current framework expires.

Previous plans have violated the state constitution, per Kansas Supreme Court decisions, for failing to provide equitable and adequate funding.

Adam Proffitt, the state budget director, recommended on Tuesday the Education Funding Task Force consider extending the current funding formula for at least a year, giving policymakers more time to iron out crucial details instead of rushing to implement the formula before June 30, 2027.

The timeline seems unrealistic, Proffitt said.

“I think we’d be setting ourselves and our schools and our students up for failure if we went down that path,” he said.

In three months, the next budget process starts, he said. In less than five months, state agencies’ first budget requests are due back to the state division of budget. In seven months, the next governor will begin crafting budget recommendations, and in nine months, the Legislature returns to finalize a new budget, giving state agencies about three months to implement significant changes.

Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican and the former chair of the bipartisan task force of lawmakers and education professionals, said last May she wanted the Legislature to view a draft of the plan this January.

After 13 meetings last year involving discussions of current funding levels and district calculations, the task force sent a report to the 2026 Legislature but did not produce any formal recommendations.

When Erickson set her goal, it was considered by some to be an aggressive timeline. As the task force moved piece-by-piece through the state’s weighting models over the course of meetings Monday and Tuesday, conflicting priorities persisted.

The task force’s Republican lawmakers want more guardrails on some of the formula’s 11 weighting models, which include calculations based on at-risk and bilingual students, low or high enrollment, school facilities, transportation, cost of living, career technical education and special education.

By the end of the two days, Rep. Susan Estes, a Wichita Republican and current chair of the task force, got a preliminary idea of what changes members wanted to pursue. Some identified at-risk funding, bilingual funding and transportation funding as key models to reevaluate. However, the task force didn’t formally decide whether to extend the current formula or barrel ahead while creating a new one.

Sen. Pat Pettey, a Kansas City Democrat, said she supported keeping the current determination formula for at-risk funding, which uses the number of students in a district who qualify for the national free lunch program.

No other method for calculating at-risk funding is as direct, she said.

Erickson was skeptical that there was data showing funds being allocated for at-risk kids was producing desirable outcomes.

“As chair of the Senate Education Committee, we have not seen that,” she said.

She said she wanted to be sure that more than half a billion dollars is actually helping kids.

“I want to see proof — that’s a lot of money — that it’s actually going to help the at-risk students to improve their outcomes,” Erickson said.

At-risk funding was a hot button discussion topic during the legislative session. One senator proposed legislation that would require schools to verify the income of each student applying for free lunch to ensure an at-risk calculation that wasn’t skewed.