Students deliver postcards to governor
Staff & Wire Reports
Friday, December 15, 2006
With their hands full of brightly colored postcards, students from the six state universities urged Gov. Kathleen Sebelius on Thursday to make repairing crumbling classrooms a top budget priority in 2007.
The students gathered the 6,500 postcards in recent weeks on their campuses, each signed by students and asking Sebelius to “make a down payment on my future.” That included 1,100 postcards from Emporia State University. The cost of bringing the Board of Regents universities’ 567 buildings up to snuff is estimated at $727 million, up 24 percent from two years ago.
“We, the students, say the need can’t be put off any longer and the time to act is now,” said Ginger Niemann, a Pittsburg State University senior and leader of the Regents’ student advisory council.
She said a good step would be $180 million, which would cover about 25 percent of the costs in the first year.
Nicole Corcoran, spokeswoman for Sebelius, said the coordinated effort was helpful and that the students’ voices would be heard as the governor assembles her budget recommendations.
“The fact we have these postcards and we have students who are taking time to make their voices heard, that absolutely makes a difference,” Corcoran said. “This is something that she will focus on.”
The students have been working on their campuses to urge Sebelius to address the maintenance backlog in her budget proposal. Students also wrote e-mails and made telephone calls to the governor’s office pushing the issue.
“The students have really led the way on this issue,” Niemann said. “Students have made an important investment in higher education. We want the maximum return on that investment.”
“I thought it was pretty phenomenal,” agreed Mary Shivley, ESU’s leadership development coordinator. “There’s a lot of education that went from our students to their peers ... not just ‘Here, will you sign this postcard?” but ‘Here’s what’s happening.’”
Legislative leaders have said university maintenance will be a priority when the session begins Jan. 8. However, most indicate that a logical approach would be to make an initial investment to whittle down the repair list while increasing the annual appropriation for routine maintenance.
Senate Ways and Means Committee chairman Dwayne Umbarger, R-Thayer, said university maintenance is one of the top five priorities raised in discussions he has had with other state officials.
“The people across the state are informed about this issue and I think they are expecting that we’re going to take some action to address it,” Umbarger said. “The hard part is what kind of program are we going to do. We couldn’t do this all in one year.”
Though state revenues are running ahead of projections, Umbarger said it would be helpful to find new sources to fund the maintenance backlog and other state programs. He didn’t suggest where the extra money might come from.
The Board of Regents estimates it would cost $4.5 billion to replace the buildings rather than repairing them for the $727 million price tag. The state currently spends $15 million on those projects annually, short of the $84 million regents say is needed each year to keep the facilities from falling into disrepair.
Lucas Maddy, Kansas State University student body president, said that at a recent campus discussion, one student brought a piece from a 1930s desk in the military science building that had broken.
“We’re sitting on some 60- and 70-year-old pieces of equipment that creak and crack,” Maddy said.