The attacks on public schools continues in earnest...

Kansas School Districts Shut Down Weeks Early Thanks To Gov. Brownback's Tax-Slashing Zeal

by Alan Pyke
Posted on April 3, 2015 at 1:43 pm Updated: April 3, 2015 at 2:56 pm
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When Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) pledged to improve the lives of kids in his state on the campaign trail, this probably isn't what he had in mind.
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A pair of Kansas public school districts will close down early this school year and the state's current leadership is so committed to continuing a radical, budget-destroying tax cut experiment that it won't furnish the resources necessary to allow these communities to finish out the academic calendar.
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"We are popular with the kids but not the parents," Concordia district Superintendent Bev Mortimer told the Wichita Eagle after announcing that her schools will shut down six days earlier than planned. In the Twin Valley district, just south of Mortimer's terrain, schools are closing down 12 days ahead of schedule. The districts are "losing $51 million they expected to receive for the current school year after Gov. Sam Brownback signed a school funding overhaul bill in March," the paper explains. Brownback disputes that causal claim, but the school board in Twin Valley specifically referenced "mid-year, unplanned financial cuts recently signed into law."
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The early closures are a micro-level indicator of what's really a macro-level problem across all of Kansas' public services to its people. Brownback has followed through on a promise to all but erase the state's income tax code, ditching all taxes on a class of businesses known as "pass-through entities." Many of the people who rely on the pass-through structure for tax purposes are only businesses in the sense that they collect royalties for a book or other non-wage compensation from something that isn't a standard payroll job, and a vanishingly small percentage of such tax entities are "small businesses" in the traditional, job-creating sense. But anyone who can present their income as "pass-through" cash to the state of Kansas can sidestep income taxes.
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