A Kansas parent has a right to expect a working classroom before another Statehouse argument about what teachers may say. Governor Laura Kelly put dollars behind that expectation. The 2025 state budget fully funded K–12 education for the seventh consecutive year and added $10 million in special education aid.
That record is unusually clear in a political season full of slogans. School districts must hire teachers, keep buses moving and meet the needs of children whose support costs do not vanish when legislators change the subject. Kelly signed Senate Bill 125 because those obligations were in the budget, even as she warned that its long-term finances could put Kansas in the red by fiscal year 2028. She did not call a flawed budget perfect just to claim a victory.
The bill also put $1.25 million toward rural child care and more than $34 million in additional funding for community and technical colleges. Those are connected choices. A parent needs care to take a job; a student needs an affordable path into one; a school needs enough people and money to teach the children in front of it.
Kansas Republicans often talk as if public education is an abstraction that can wait behind the next culture-war bill. Kelly's 2026 budget proposal again made school funding a central commitment. When she later signed the Legislature's 2026 budget, she criticized its cuts to school mental-health services and special education. The disagreement was concrete: how much help reaches a child, and what the state chooses to pay for instead.
Full funding does not mean every school has everything it needs. Kelly said so herself when she objected to the special education shortfall. But it does mean Kansans can judge her record by an enacted budget instead of a campaign speech. A seventh year of full K–12 funding is something a classroom can use.
The argument is not merely whether a budget line looks generous from Topeka. It is whether a district can keep a counselor, fill a special education position and give a student the help state law promises. Republicans can claim to value schools while fighting Kelly over the dollars that let those schools function. Parents know the difference between a ceremony about children and a budget that pays the people who teach them. Kelly kept returning to the second one.
For families measuring politics by the school their child attends, Kelly made the right fight unavoidable. Put the students on the ledger first. Then make every politician who wants to spend elsewhere explain why.
