By Baya Burgess, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — A Lawrence second grade teacher said educators in the beginning their careers would suffer if the state cut paraprofessionals, a move suggested by a presenter to the task force working on Kansas’ next school finance formula.
After the meeting last week, Lori Greenfield of Prairie Park Elementary said new teachers depend on behavioral specialists and classroom assistants.
“They’re either going to stay with the profession or they’re going to quit because they have no one backing them,” she said.
The speaker, professor Marguerite Roza, directs an education finance organization called Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Roza presented Kansas Legislature’s Education Funding Task Force members data indicating no correlation between teacher aides and academic achievement.
“Schools love having more paraprofessionals around, but that is rarely the case that that translates to greater improvement for students,” Roza said.
On a video call, Roza showed a graph in which one line represented state funding climbingbeginning in 2013, landing 18% above the rate of inflation in 2024. Underneath it, two lines declined, the Kansas math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress exam.
After the presentation, Rep. Nikki McDonald, an Olathe Democrat, task force member and teacher, said “return on investment” language restricts a rounded approach to funding education.
“This really lacks a lot of nuance and treats education as just a financial transaction. And it really ignores broader values from a personal and cultural and social perspective,” McDonald said.
Though Roza denied saying “ROI,”she did a couple of times during the presentation. The first graph is titled Kansas ROI over time on the Edunomics website.
Roza restated her main goal, helping schools leverage available public dollars. Still, her approach was grounded in an economic growth perspective.
“A strong teacher can have an effect on a student’s life 30 years later,” Roza said “And not just from a sentimental point of view, like I remember my fourth grade teacher really believed in me. I don’t mean just that, I mean we can track it to future income.”
Leah Fliter, an advocacy director for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said she didn’t think the graphs shown at the meeting represent the whole truth of Kansas schools.
“Student achievement is a little more complex than just one test,” Fliter said in a phone interview.
Fliter said the data neglects achievement in artistic subjects, increased challenging student behavior and underfunding of special education.
“The biggest flaw is that her work assumes that, in this case, Kansas has all the funding that we need in our formula to get results,” she said.
Four Kansas public school districts are seeking to sue the state for inadequate special education funding.
Brad Neuenswander, a member of the task force and the superintendent of the Jefferson West school district, said underfunded special education and rising insurance challenge his district’s budget on the second day of the two-day meeting.
Neuenswander said his district will have to take $900,000 from general operations to cover special education. Health insurance, he added, went up $288,000 this year for his district.
“I would like to get more instructional aids, more paras, more classroom support. Our highest priority is a social worker,” he said. “But we can’t even advertise for it yet, because how do I cut 350,000?”
Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican, responded to Neuenswander. According to the data she looked up, Nuenswander’s district received $1.3 million from 2025-2026, which, she said, would more than cover the increases he mentioned.
Neuenswander said he wasn’t sure about that number, but joked, “Could you forward that to me?”
In addition to Roza’s presentation, the task force spent hours reviewing dozens of pages of data from legislative researchers and the Kansas Department of Education on many areas of Kansas academic achievement.
Melissa Rooker, executive director of the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and task force member, said she felt overwhelmed.
“I look at the mountain of data in front of us, and I’m wondering if we are allowing all of this data to run the conversation, as opposed to forming the question that we want answered, and then thinking about the data that’s necessary to do the appropriate evaluation, ” she said.
Fliter of KASB said some task force members had too narrow of a perspective on measuring student success.
“There are other members of the task force who seem to really be wanting to say, ‘Well, we just need to focus on one measure, and if you don’t improve on that particular measure, then we’re going to cut your funding,’” she said.
The task force is running out of time to submit a draft plan to the Legislature. The current funding formula expires June 30, 2027, when a new formula must be implemented.
The task force chair, Rep. Susan Estes, a Wichita Republican, requested 10 more days of meetings but was allowed only two. The task force is awaiting approval from the Legislature before meeting again.
