Would it really be possible for Kansas’s at-risk program explode to a budget-busting $1.5 billion annually? I asked that question in June as something of a hypothetical, but that just took a step closer to become reality. Here’s a quick review of how that could happen.
- At-risk funding in Kansas is currently based on eligibility for students’ qualifications for free lunch under United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines.
- Primarily, students qualify for free lunch based on family income. There are a few other exceptions – most notably tying free lunch qualifications to Medicaid – that that bring the total Kansas public school students eligible for free lunch to roughly 44% of statewide enrollment.
- All at-risk funding comes from state coffers. The feds do not contribute any money to the program designed to improve the student achievement of those at risk of failing.
- Any student who receives free lunch under USDA guidelines generates state funding to that student’s district per state statute. For the 2022-34 school year, those free lunch students generated $563 million.
- The gist of the previous essay was to once again point out how ludicrous it is to bind funding the at-risk program here in Kansas to eligibility for free lunch. By doing so, the state is financially vulnerable to the whims of a federal agency (USDA) that has nothing to do with the way Kansas funds K-12 education. This isn’t an indictment of the lunch program itself but it’s the idea of tying Kansas’s funding formula to something that is (1) beyond the scope of legislators to influence and (2) the fact that free lunch qualification is a terrible proxy for actual student academic vulnerabilities.
- The upshot of all this is if the feds decide that all students should be eligible for free lunch, the state would be on the hook for over $1.5 billion to fund an at-risk program that has been woefully inept – actually, an abject failure – at improving the student achievement of truly at-risk students.
It seemed just three short months ago that this is Little Chicken thinking. Well…Chicken Little just got Chicken Bigger.
Why? A little thing called presidential politics, that’s why.
Three days after the previous essay was published, the infamous debate took place between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, who was at the time was running for reelection. Well, we all know how that turned out; the Dems threw sitting President Biden overboard and elevated V.P. Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.
In turn, candidate Harris chose sitting Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. And guess what? Just last year, Governor Walz signed a law that makes all students in the Land of 10,000 Lakes eligible for free lunch, making Minnesota one of eight states along with California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico and Vermont to make available free school lunch to all students. In each case, the state is responsible for footing the bill.
If V.P. Harris and Walz are ultimately elected in November, it is completely reasonable to believe the Harris Administration would push to make all students nationwide eligible for free lunch.
Why not? After all, at least at the state level, like Walz’s Minnesota and Harris’s home state of California, the state has to have a balanced budget. As we all know, that’s not the case when it comes to the feds.
Again, to repeat from the previous essay, that would put Kansas on the hook for a $1.5 billion at-risk program, given current state law.
To avoid this budgetary disaster, the Legislature would have to act. One stumbling block, of course, is Governor Kelly, who consistently favors giving K-12 education as much money as is governmentally possible.
The answer to avoiding such a catastrophe is simple. Stop pairing federal lunch policy to providing services students need to do better in school.
This is an opportunity to throw out the existing unacceptable at-risk program and replace it with this model that is student-centered, not school-focused as is the current case.
A pillar of the new model would be to link funding to students who are actually academically at risk, not those who eat for free.
After all, it’s better to be proactive than reactive.
