Sharon Hartin Iorio
Currently proposed legislation for at-risk public school students is an ill-considered mistake. At this writing, part of a bill moving through the Kansas House, if passed in its present form, would set poor precedents for school choice and is fraught with unintended consequences.
The existing law allows low-income K-12 students who are designated at high risk by their schools and attend the 100 lowest performing schools, to receive as much as $8,000 in state scholarships for private schooling. The funds are made possible through tax credits.
The proposed bill increases the number of scholarship recipients by allowing qualifying students in any school to receive scholarship funding. In addition, it assigns the approximate per pupil $4,500 per year of base state funding to “individual savings accounts” and allows these students to draw down their funds yearly to use for private school tuition and other educational needs. Since about 50% of Kansas students re
Currently proposed legislation for at-risk public school students is an ill-considered mistake. At this writing, part of a bill moving through the Kansas House, if passed in its present form, would set poor precedents for school choice and is fraught with unintended consequences.
The existing law allows low-income K-12 students, who are designated at high risk by their schools and attend the 100 lowest performing schools, to receive as much as $8,000 in state scholarships for private schooling. The funds are made possible through tax credits.
The proposed bill increases the number of scholarship recipients by allowing qualifying students in any school to receive scholarship funding. In addition, it assigns the approximate per pupil $4,500 per year of base state funding to “individual savings accounts” and allows these students to draw down their funds yearly to use for private school tuition and other educational needs.
Kansas Rushes Bill to Help Residents With High Energy Bills A new law provides temporary relief to residents who received extremely high bills for natural gas use during the February cold front. Officials are investigating the price spike with concerns about price gouging. Andrew Bahl, The Topeka Capital-Journal | March 4, 2021 | News
(TNS) State legislators are moving with breakneck speed to provide assurances to ratepayers and municipalities who are staring down the barrel of sky-high energy bills after bitter cold temperatures rammed the state and region last month.
A new program to provide loans to municipalities, which will have to pay bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars within the next week, was fast-tracked with an aim to having the money in the hands of cities as soon as possible.