By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON — Despite the higher visibility of some school board races due to controversy over COVID response and what some may see as future threats in curriculum, from a fundamental standpoint, new school board members will walk in to a situation where the math problems may not change.
"It appears that the funding situation is relatively stable," said Mark Tallman with the Kansas Association of School Boards. "The system we're trying to have in place to do some things around looking at student learning, both measurements and supports are relatively stable, but that can change at any time and I guess that's the exciting thing about being part of this."
There are state issues that constrain local school board actions, to a point.
"By and large, how much money a district gets is determined by the state," Tallman said. "How we measure progress is often determined by the state. The framework of things like how you negotiate with teachers is an issue that will be coming up next spring for a lot of boards. Many new board members are not very familiar with this. It really is a balance between the powers you have that are very important, but also understanding the limits on those powers, that I think surprise many new board members."
In addition, because they are the appropriators, the legislature can pass bills to open or close the checkbook based on their political wants and needs and not those of a local district, but eventually, there is hope that local boards will be able to get back to some of the priorities they were working on before COVID challenged normal for a couple of years.
"We've had a lot of good achievements educationally," Tallman said. "We know that there are kids who still aren't getting to where we need to be and we know we're struggling with having people with the skills to do the things that we want done. Some of those efforts, I think, were really pushed out of the spotlight by the pandemic."
It's also still unknown exactly how much real learning loss there was as a result of COVID and what kinds of supports will even be possible to help patch that up, since schools are having just as hard a time hiring people as the rest of the economy.