Proposal would allow competitive bidding for reading initiative
by Dave Ranney, KHI News Service
The House Social Services Budget Committee on Thursday voted to recommend continued support for the Parents as Teachers program and to open an elementary school reading program to competitive bids.
The recommendations will be forwarded to the House Appropriations Committee.
Support for the reading program is contingent upon the federal government allowing the state to spend a portion of its Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant on Parents as Teachers.
If the spending is allowed, Parents as Teachers would give up $3 million in tobacco master settlement agreement monies and, in turn, receive $3 million from TANF.
The switch would make $3 million in the state’s tobacco fund available for the reading program.
Generally, TANF monies are meant for children and families living in poverty, not for education programs. Whether the TANF grant can be used for Parents as Teachers is unclear.
After the late-afternoon hearing Thursday, the chairman of the committee, Rep. Will Carpenter, a Republican from El Dorado, said that he’d received “reasonable assurances” from the Kansas Legislative Research Department that TANF could be used to underwrite Parents as Teachers.
But on Friday morning, Kansas Department for Children and Families spokesperson Theresa Freed wrote in an email to KHI News Services: “We are not at all certain it (Parents as Teachers) will meet federal TANF requirements. We’ll need time to evaluate.”
The committee’s recommendations assume that if the switch isn’t allowed, the reading initiative, now in its second year, would be shelved.
“If the money is not available, then we can’t do it,” said Rep. Randy Garber, a Republican from Sabetha. He proposed using the tobacco money to fund the reading initiative.
Reading initiative
Earlier this year, Gov. Sam Brownback dropped the reading initiative, called Lexia Reading Core 5, from his proposed budgets for fiscal years 2016 and 2017.
Lexia is a software program that helps elementary school-age youngsters learn to read.
The program generated controversy in 2013 after Rep. Marc Rhoades, a Newton Republican and then-chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added a last-minute proviso to a session-ending budget bill that earmarked $12 million in tobacco master settlement revenues — $6 million a year for two years — for Educational Design Solutions, a small company owned by Don Fast, who lives in Rhoades’ district.
Fast’s company sells licensed access to the Lexia software. The proviso did not allow other software companies to bid on the program.
The social services budget committee’s current proposal would allow other software companies to bid on the initiative.
“There are several programs out there that meet the (Lexia) criteria,” Carpenter said. “I don’t care if we go with Lexia, all I care about is making sure third-grade kids can read.”
Mike Cook runs ESSDACK, a Hutchinson-based program that helps 52 school districts negotiate their purchases in an effort to ensure quality and lower costs. Other companies, he said, are likely to bid on the Lexia contract.
“Lexia, based on what I’ve heard from those who use it, is getting solid results,” Cook said. “It’s a quality program, but it’s like anything else: If you use it correctly, you get good results. But it’s not the only quality program that’s out there. There are a lot of them.”
Fast said his company had no objections to other companies bidding the initiative. “We would be pleased with an extension of the funding,” he wrote in an email. “We are not opposed to a competitive bid process (and never have been), and would look forward to a competitive analysis of the results along with comparable costs.”
Fees for Parents as Teachers?
Each year since 2008, Kansas Parents as Teachers has received approximately $7.3 million from the Children’s Initiatives Fund, a repository for the state’s tobacco settlement money.
The $7.3 million includes the $3 million to be replaced with TANF money.
Other recommendations endorsed by the nine-member committee:
• Move $200,000 out of the Parents as Teachers’ budget and into the budget for the Court Appointed Special Advocates.
• Consider launching a two-year pilot project for measuring the effects of adopting sliding-scale fees for Parents as Teachers services to families with incomes above 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which would be about $48,000 of annual income for a family of four.
Both measures passed, 5-4.
Now in its 25th year, Parents as Teachers does not charge for its services.
“Someone can make $500,000 a year and get the program for free,” Carpenter said. “If you make $500,000 and you think this is a good program, I don’t see why you can’t pay for it.”
Rep. Kristey Williams, a Republican from Augusta, agreed, calling the sliding-scale fees “a great thing for taxpayers.”
But Rep. Barbara Ballard, a Democrat from Lawrence, said she was uncomfortable with the notion of denying services to needy families, regardless of their incomes.
“Income does not determine how well a person will parent and do the right thing,” Ballard said.
Rep. Stephanie Clayton, a Lenexa Republican, warned that assessing and collecting fees would require setting up a bureaucracy that likely would end up costing more than it would generate.
“I’d rather we spend money on services like we do now,” she said.
Nancy Keel, president of the Kansas Parents as Teachers Association, said the effects of enacting sliding-scale fees would be difficult to measure because each of the 70 programs are full and have waiting lists.
Shannon Cotsoradis, president and CEO of Kansas Action for Children, said she expects the recommendations to generate more regulatory hassle than the committee expects.
“Two questions going on here,” she said. “One is: Can TANF dollars be used for this purpose? The answer at this point is unclear, but if you look at the purposes that have been allowed in the past, this, at best, would be a stretch.”
The other question, Cotsoradis said, has to do with the prospects of the TANF regulations limiting Parents as Teachers services to children in low-income families.
“The complexities of keeping the $4 million from the Children’s Initiatives Fund and the TANF $3 million separate on the local level will be far beyond what they’d like to see addressed in a pilot project,” she said. “It would fundamentally change the program in a way that would go well beyond what the committee recommended.”
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