Editor’s note: This story was updated at 12:20 p.m. Thursday to include input from the Spring Hill school district.
Johnson County area school districts have raised the alarm about a funding bill working its way through the Kansas Legislature that they say would result in millions of dollars lost for K-12 education.
The bill, Senate substitute for House Bill 2007, passed Tuesday evening on emergency final action in the Kansas Senate. It lays out funding for agencies across the state, including for public schools and programs that benefit them. The bill also includes significant cuts to a broad spectrum of state agencies, departments and initiatives.
Before the Kansas Senate took action on the bill, the superintendents of the three largest school districts in Johnson County — Olathe, Shawnee Mission and Blue Valley — sent a joint letter Tuesday to Kansas legislators expressing “serious concern about the impact” of the bill on their school districts due to reductions in special education funding and other cuts.
Funding for special education — and funding for Kansas public schools in general — has been a hot topic for several years. In Kansas, the state is legally obligated to cover 92% of special education costs incurred by school districts, who are required by law to meet the needs of students receiving special education services.
Public school officials and some area politicians have long decried the state’s failure to fully fund special education over the years, forcing the districts to cover the costs by transferring money out of their general funds. That means less money is then available to pay for other district activities.
In their letter, the superintendents acknowledged that last year the Legislature moved closer to the statutory requirement. Still, the three school districts said they’d transferred a combined $230.3 million out of general fund accounts to cover special education funding shortfalls in the past three school years alone.
“These are real dollars, real impacts on students, teachers and classrooms,” the superintendents wrote.
Since the vote in the Kansas Senate advancing the appropriations bill, Olathe Public Schools Superintendent Brent Yeager said “it doesn’t look real optimistic at this point.” Still, the school district planned to keep pleading for more special education funding.
“It just doesn’t appear that there’s a lot of capacity in the Legislature to add additional money for [special education] right now, so we are not overly optimistic,” he told the Post in an interview Wednesday.
JoCo superintendents worried about SPED funding, other cuts
Olathe schools’ Yeager, Tonya Merrigan from Blue Valley Schools and Michael Schumacher from the Shawnee Mission School District said in the joint letter they were upset to see the Kansas Legislature walk back steps they’d taken in the 2025 budget process that seemed like positive momentum toward meeting the statutory requirement to cover 92% of special education funding.
“Unfortunately, HB 2007 halts that progress by failing to provide adequate new SPED funding for the 2025-26 school year—leaving schools with growing financial obligations and little to no additional support,” they wrote. “This failure to adequately increase SPED funding forces our districts to make damaging choices: we must divert even more dollars away from general operations, core classroom instruction, and vital student programs to fulfill the obligation left by the unfulfilled commitment and budget shortfall.”
The letter includes a table that shows how much each school district has had to move out of its general fund since the 2022-23 school year to make up for shortfalls in the state’s special education allocation.
Shawnee Mission had to transfer out a combined $60 million and Blue Valley had to transfer out a combined $67.9 million in those three academic years. Olathe, the largest district in Johnson County and the second largest in the state of Kansas, has spent $102.4 million from its general fund on special education since the 2022-23 school year.
If the appropriation bill becomes law, then those transfers will have to continue, the superintendents warned.
Additionally, the school districts called out how the Legislature was “stripping” funds from other programs tied to public education, including Career and Technical Education student transportation and initiatives that support educators.
The superintendents called it “a direct hit to teacher quality, recruitment and retention” in an era when that’s increasingly been an issue already.
They implored the Legislature to reconsider the path they’ve taken with the funding bill.
“Failure to act will force districts to make serious decisions as it relates to the future of programs, staff and services, shifting the burden to local communities and undermining educational quality across Kansas,” the superintendents wrote.
Read their complete letter below:
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Open in new tab All of this spells “uncertainty,” Olathe superintendent says
Yeager told the Post it’s hard to say what exactly Olathe Public Schools will have to do to make the funding equation work if the state appropriations bill becomes law.
“The reality is…that we have to make some really challenging decisions,” he said, noting the school district continues to have to relocate in excess of $30 million a year from the general fund to cover shortfalls in the state’s special education contribution. “That’s real dollars.”
Yeager said it can be a roadblock for the district, making it challenging to explore “innovative programming,” like implementing education research, new language programs or other new opportunities.
“It really impacts, not just our students with special needs, but every student that walks through the thresholds of our doors,” he said.
And at the same time, the national public education outlook is also unclear as the Trump administration sets its sights on gutting the U.S. Department of Education. Taken together, that amplifies the “uncertainty,” Yeager said.
But all of it has started to create a sense of panic among some district employees, Yeager said, who worry about what it all means for students and the services they rely on, like free and reduced meals, at-risk preschool and reading and math support.
“From the seat I sit in, a lot of it is trying to help our staff remain calm,” he said.
Smaller JoCo school districts are worried too
For USD 232, a smaller Johnson County district covering parts of Shawnee, Lenexa and De Soto, the immediate “negative impacts” are what has district officials worried.
“More immediately, if approved as written, USD 232 will receive a cut in funding this school year of approximately $200,000,” spokesperson Alvie Cater wrote in an email to the Post. “The district would literally have to write a check back to the state for nearly half that amount for funds that were already obligated, received from Kansas, and expended.”
But to be clear, Cater said the school district is also concerned about a reduction in special education funding from the state.
“These services are required by law. Without an increase in special education funding, other programs and opportunities for students are now in jeopardy,” he said, specifically calling out student engineering education programs and the district’s plans to add orchestra. “As always, USD 232 will rise above to do what is best, but [it] may come with difficult decisions.”
In the previous school year, USD 232 spent $16.2 million on special education, and because the state and federal government did not fully fund it, the school district redirected roughly $7.5 million from the general fund “to make up the difference,” Cater said.
A spokesperson from the Spring Hill school district said Spring Hill is “in agreement with what the big three have expressed” in the letter to lawmakers.
At the time of publication, the Shawnee Mission School District and Blue Valley schools had not responded to the Post’s request for follow-up comment on the bill’s passage in the Kansas Senate.
The Gardner-Edgerton school district declined to comment.
What are state senators from JoCo saying?
Sen. Beverly Gossage, Sen. TJ Rose, Sen. Adam Thomas, Sen. Mike Thompson, all Republicans, voted in favor of the bill.
Sen. Thompson, from Shawnee, said his colleagues believe there’s been a “misuse” of funds that are supposed to go to special education in Kansas school districts — something Yeager, the superintendent of Olathe schools, outright denied in an interview with the Post Wednesday.
“They put that money in their general fund and used it on other items, leaving special education students underfunded,” Thompson said in an emailed statement to the Post. “The complaints you may be hearing now are likely related to the fact that these districts cannot now use special ed funding for other spending in their local option budgets. In other words, they can no longer use the special ed funds as a slush fund.”
Thompson also pointed to achievement as a reason to consider cuts to public education.
“I wish we were seeing better achievement scores as a result of all that spending,” he said. “Unfortunately, taxpayers are footing the bill for school funding and not seeing the results they would like.”
Sen. Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, Sen. Ethan Corson, Sen. Cindy Holscher and Sen. Pat Pettey, all Democrats, voted against the bill, as did Republican Sen. Kellie Warren.
Sen. Sykes, from Lenexa, who leads the Democrats in the Kansas Senate, specifically referenced the letter from the Johnson County superintendents in her emailed statement to the Post, saying she was particularly struck about the cut to special education funding and other programs that now face serious reductions.
“Republicans are failing their obligation to fully fund our schools,” Sykes wrote to the Post. “ALL students and staff will feel this lack of funding.”
She also lamented the bill’s approval process, calling it “rushed.”
“[T]he [Republican] supermajority wildly took a machete to the budget without any thought, just to make cuts for [cuts’] sake,” Sykes said. “We are better than this and we owe it to the people of Kansas to take this seriously, and this budget isn’t a serious work product.”
In response to emailed questions from the Post, Sen. Corson, of Prairie Village, said he voted against the bill “because, among other things, the bill backtracks on our obligation to fully fund Special Education.”
“I think this funding bill will negatively impact Johnson County schools and make it more difficult for them to provide the top-quality educational experience that parents expect and students deserve,” Corson said.
At the time of publication, Sen. Holscher, Sen. Gossage, Sen. Pettey and Sen. Warren had not responded to the Post’s request for comment on the bill. We will update this report with their statements if we hear back.
Now what?
- Now, the Kansas House and Kansas Senate versions of this bill will need to be rectified because the Kansas Senate passed an amended version.
- The bill goes next to a Conference Committee made up of representatives from both chambers of the state legislature. They are tasked with drafting a version that could be affirmed in both chambers.
- The bill doesn’t become law until Gov. Laura Kelly signs it, and she would have the opportunity to veto it.
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