As expected, the Kansas Senate has introduced SB 75 (the “school choice act”). This year’s proposal is a $125M pool of tax credits for private school and homeschool children. Meanwhile, Capitol Bee has introduced the Capitol Bee Bill Tracker, a new feature on the DataHive website that makes it exceptionally fast and easy to search through bills and see digested summaries of their contents.

Table of Contents

• An $8,000 private school credit for every child?

  • Flooding the Zone

• What’s this DataHive Bill Tracker?

• Referral Program

An $8,000 private school credit for every child?

I’m not going to bury the lede on this one. That’s what’s being proposed: an $8,000 tax refund for every private school student in Kansas at an accredited school–and $4,000 for every private school student in a non-accredited school.

Procedurally, the Republican supermajority has worked to stack the deck in favor of the proposal. The bill wasn’t downloadable until later on Friday, and the Senate Education committee rules require 2 days notice to be allowed to testify in person. (If you’re reading this early enough on Monday morning, it’s still possible to submit written testimony up until noon today (January 27) by emailing the Committee Assistant.

I haven’t written much (yet) this year about the committees and the testimony process, in large part because there is so much work involved in monitoring every flinch and file that gets posted to kslegislature.gov in the dark of night. If you’ve been reading our daily Topeka Buzz updates, you know there are close to 200 bills currently circulating through the capitol. Some of those bills will never leave a committee or see a vote, but regardless of their outcomes I believe it’s important to understand what is being proposed. (I’ve even had elected officials, after seeing one of our daily updates, asking for information about a bill making its way through the other chamber!)

This particular edition of the school voucher bill has three objectively bad attributes:

1. It’s essentially uncapped: it starts at $125M this year, and can increase by up to 25% per year if at least 90% of the prior year’s allocation gets claimed. It’s difficult to estimate what the full demand would be for such a program, but when combined with SB 14 (continuous state budgets) there’s essentially no way to stop the budget from exploding without explicit action by the Kansas Republicans.

2. There is no household limit, either. For some households, this would turn private school tuition from a family expense to a source of income. (Public school families won’t be receiving “rebates” for their public school participation.)

3. If the bill becomes law and subsequently challenged as unconstitutional (which it almost certainly would be), it asserts as a “poison pill” of sorts that every private school family may join in the suit.

Flooding the Zone

There are presently three dozen bills with the word “education” in them: everything from art therapist licensure to allowing school districts to employ chaplains to decreasing the ad valorem tax rate for public school districts to mandatory performance improvement mechanisms for districts to publishing names and emails for school board members.

Here are a few of the other more impactful proposals:

• SB 63 and HB 2071: The “help not harm” act, aka gender transition therapy ban for persons under 18.

• HB 2010 and HB 2009: Abortion bans and criminalization.

• SB 19 and SB 29: Prohibitions against quarantines and vaccine requirements.

Some have written me to ask, “but what can I do?” I believe our primary duty, as citizens and members of the community, is to participate. Flooding the zone is a strategy designed to overwhelm a system so it can’t muster an effective response. The hard part to accept is that…well, flooding the zone works. But it doesn’t work forever, because it consumes great amounts of resources to sustain the flood.

Your job, then, is simply to survive the flood. To maintain connection with others. To plan the cleanup for when the wave crests.

Capitol Bee is here, planning with you.

What’s this DataHive Bill Tracker?

If you’ve been reading our daily Topeka legislative update, congratulations! You might have more stamina for this than I do. It’s taken a tremendous amount of effort just to summarize the bills that are getting filed and their relative import, but it was quickly obvious that a disposable email message wasn’t going to be sufficient.

That’s why I’m very pleased to announce public availability of our Bill Tracker, now live on the DataHive website. This has all of the information we’ve been gathering for the Topeka Buzz, but now it’s searchable and can be easily shared with others simply by pasting a link to a bill of interest. The current capabilities are limited just to searching and reading (including the PDF bills), but we have greater plans:

• Automatic email notifications when action happens on a bill

• Proactive notifications when a new bill or document of interest gets filed

• AI-powered enhancements for reading, interpreting, and evaluating the impact of different bills

This tool is literally 0 days old, so there will be some bugs I’m sure. But we’re already finding it to be quite useful, and hope you do as well. I’m committed to keeping access to information free to subscribers and the public, but over time there will be some features that will probably be restricted to Supporters.

Referral Program

A quick plug for our new Referral Program: the more people you share Capitol Bee with and persuade to subscribe, the more rewards you’re going to unlock!