Well, it finally happened…or will shortly.
The State Board of Education will decide this week whether Gov. Laura Kelly’s executive order to delay until after Labor Day the reopening of Kansas K-12 public schools will stand. It can vote yes or no. It may be the most memorable decision that the board has taken in years.
Yes, there’s been an exhaustive study by about 1,000 school officials, employees, professional associations, unions and such about the best and safest way to open schools for hundreds of thousands of public school students and the administrators, teachers, para-professionals, maintenance staff, bus drivers and volunteers who make the state’s education industry work.
That new “Navigating Change 2020” plan for just how to reopen schools as safely and possible has been approved. It creates new cadres of students: full-time at school buildings, part-time at school buildings and purely off-site students who will learn through the Internet and dropped-off at home study materials.
COVID-19 has made everything complicated: spacing of desks, masks, hourly handwashing, and more temperature-taking than anyone ever expected. Oh, and making sure that those at-home students actually spend time studying. That’s 465 hours a year for kindergarten students and more than 1,000 hours of actual school work for older students.
But the issue that will put the State Board in the headlights is simply “when.”
The 10-member board, eight Republicans, two Democrats, will have five seats up for election this year. Three of those five seats up for election are uncontested. Two will have primary elections and then general elections in November.
The issue of allowing the Democrat governor to say when schools can reopen isn’t just political, though parts of it are. If the governor’s executive order is accepted, then she has either protected Kansans’ lives and futures or just meddled in decisions that should be made by locally elected school boards. If the governor’s executive order is rejected, then presumably every COVID-19 illness related to schools is the State Board’s responsibility.
No, of course not, it’s not nearly that simple, but it’s how the politics of the after-Labor Day reopening will be cast, probably not heavily in the low-budget State Board campaigns, but by legislators who are seeking re-election, or election for the first time.
Of course, nothing in the Statehouse is non-political, but up to now, it’s been pretty non-political on the State Board of Education (maybe that “creation” issue earlier this century, but not much since then). And, of course, those State Board candidates are down toward the bottom of the ballot, where many voters aren’t even going to recognize the candidate names.
What’s the board likely to do? Well, lawmakers have found that it is rarely politically damaging to point to the governor and her executive orders when things go wrong or grow inconvenient, like closing tattoo parlors and beauty shops. And, when those orders go right – like those drive-through drink pickups – well, it’s something that lawmakers will follow up on next session for the publicity it will create.
The talk: that members of the board are being inundated in constituent calls and appear to be breaking about even between affirming the governor’s order and rejecting it, largely over the conservatives’ favorite argument – local control.
But it’s different on the State Board, where you are talking about children and their health and the health of their families, not just property taxes or fence law.
Curious how this one’s going to come out, and who calls it a victory and who calls it a defeat whichever way the State Board goes…
Syndicated by Hawver News Company LLC of Topeka; Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver's Capitol Report—to learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit the website at www.hawvernews.com