About 400 people attended a Board Night Out at Wichita’s West High School Monday evening. A similar number attended another forum at Wichita’s Southeast High School.
USD259 Wichita Board of Education President Barbara Fuller, board member Lanora Nolan and Superintendent John Allison attended the West High gathering and offered their assessments of the decisions facing the [...]

By Gene Meyer, KansasReporter
TOPEKA, Kan. – Bright kids who like to work with their hands – and potentially make more money than many traditional college graduates – would get a break in a new school funding plan that was the subject of a Kansas Senate Education committee hearing Thursday.
The plan proposed by state Sen. Steve Abrams, [...]

UPDATEED to correct and further explain bylaws change and open meetings reference.
NEWTON – Schools for Fair Funding (SFFF) voted today to proceed with a lawsuit seeking an increase in state education funding. Today’s meeting was the first since the Kansas Supreme Court’s rejection last week of the group’s petition to reopen the Montoy case mandating [...]

Audits released Wednesday show Gov. Mark Parkinson and state Senate leaders are missing millions of wasted tax dollars when they claim they must raise taxes to balance the budget because spending cuts are exhausted.
Auditors presented two reports to the Legislative Post Audit (LPA) Committe. One found potential savings of $537,200 per year in the $4 [...]

By Gene Meyer, KansasReporter

Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson asked lawmakers for a temporary, three-year, one cent increase in the state’s sales tax. He also wants higher tobacco taxes to help plug what now is estimated to be a $400 million hole in the state’s fiscal 2011 budget.

“When we should be reducing the size of [...]

The first Kansas school district  to complete an efficiency audit could save another $1 million a year even though it already spends less per pupil on non-instruction functions than similar districts.
But the audit isn’t all good news. Derby, USD260, is one of only four of the state’s 293 districts to ask for an audit by [...]

It’s rewarding to see KanssWatchdog’s reporting discussed on various news forums and comment sections online. Commenters on a CJOnline.com forum on budget cuts made a few assertions on unencumbered funds that merited correction.
One poster compared unencumbered funds to a mortgage escrow account. A bank or other mortgage holder accumulates a little from each monthly mortgage [...]