By STEPHEN KORANDA

Kansas Democrats scored critical wins in the last election. Now they’re struggling to transform those victories into Democratic-minded policies, and to hold on to the corners of power they’ve captured.

They meet in their annual convention this weekend to pick party leaders and search for consensus on strategies for governing and see if they can repeat last year’s election wins next year.

“It’s a time for Democrats to celebrate,” said Kansas House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer in an interview, “but we need to keep working and moving forward.”

In 2018, Democrat Laura Kelly won the governor’s race and Democrat Sharice Davids unseated a Republican incumbent to represent the Kansas City suburbs in Congress.

The 2020 election will put all the state legislative seats on the table and a prize Democrats have dreamed of for decades: an open U.S. Senate seat they like to think they can win.

Next year’s races could launch Democrats on a new path to political relevance in Kansas. Or it could leave the party withering into the triviality of the recent past, when Republicans held all the statewide offices, congressional seats and huge majorities in the Statehouse.

At the state Republican Party convention last month, Republicans made clear they’re eager to oust Davids from the 3rd Congressional District in 2020 and set up Kelly for defeat in 2022.

Yet some Democrats think the 2018 elections showed that the party can gain even more ground.

“That’s given folks a renewed sense of opportunity and optimism,” said Kansas Democratic Party Executive Director Ethan Corson. “It is a state that Democrats can win in and can be successful in.”

Republicans aim to make that hard. Kelly’s major budget and education proposals have so far fallen on deaf ears with Republicans, who still hold large majorities in the Legislature and the leadership jobs that come with that.

The initial stumbles haven’t discouraged Democrats, Corson said. He points out that Kelly’s still been able to accomplish things, such as signing an executive order barring discrimination against LGBT state workers.

“I don’t think anybody by any stretch ever thought it was going to be easy for the governor,” Corson said. “I’m still optimistic that she’s going to get those priorities accomplished.”

There’s a way to grease the skids for the governor’s agenda in the future: win more seats in the Legislature. Sawyer, the party’s top leader in the Kansas House, said that needs to be a major focus for Democrats.

“The next chair (of the party) needs to focus a lot on the Legislature,” Sawyer said, “to gain a few more Democrats so we can help the governor out.”

To do that, Sawyer said the party needs to build up its infrastructure into areas of the state where it’s all but disappeared, to raise money and to recruit candidates into more races.

Departing Democratic Party Chairman John Gibson, who decided not to run for another term, started that work. He boosted outreach and said now more than 75 of the state’s 105 counties have an organized Democratic Party.

Democratic state Rep. Barbara Ballard, from Lawrence, said that push needs to expand for the party to gain influence and win elections.

“If you make sure that rural areas are being included in this process, and not just all urban, then it says we are all in this together,” Ballard said.

To make inroads, Democrats will need a message they can sell. Gov. Kelly pitched herself as a consensus builder. She pushed priorities such as Medicaid expansion and education funding while working attract to moderate Republican voters.

According to Ballard, Kelly’s victory last year shows it’s a winning political position that Democrats should continue to use.

“You moved where you needed to move in order to get the job done,” she said. “Why would you want to change it?”

Democrats have had mixed fortunes in recent years. In 2016, they picked up around a dozen seats in the Legislature. They formed a coalition with moderate Republicans that helped roll back tax cuts and increase spending on schools.

In 2018, while Democrats won the governor’s office and the seat in Congress, the party failed to pick up any other statewide offices or House seats. After the election, three Republicans switched parties, leaving the GOP with an 84-41 majority in the House and 28-11 edge in the Senate. The Senate also has one independent member.

Republicans still dominate statewide offices, the Kansas congressional delegation and the Legislature.

At least three people have announced runs for chair of the Democratic Party.

Current party Vice Chair Vicki Hiatt said she’s already had a hand in expanding the party’s infrastructure and recruiting candidates. As chair, she would continue expansion into more areas of Kansas and focus on the fundraising needed to build the party.

She’d concentrate on protecting Davids’ congressional seat and shoot to win next year’s U.S. Senate race.

“We will be working really hard for the U.S. Senate candidate,” she said. “That will be a target.”

George Hanna, from Tecumseh, was a candidate for the House in the last election and said he’d focus on gains in rural areas.

“We all have a job to do — fundraise, develop an inclusive caucus process and find our new representatives,” he said in a Facebook post announcing he would run.

A third candidate, Chris Roesel from Johnson County, touts his experience running for local elected offices.

But the field of candidates is not limited. The Democratic convention will bring together hundreds of party loyalists from across the state. The leadership elections are open to all nominations and more than 200 party members will vote to pick the winner.

“Anybody can run,” Sawyer said. “Quite often it is pretty wide open.”

Stephen Koranda is the Statehouse reporter the Kansas News Service Kansas. Follow him on Twitter @kprkoranda.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump announced Saturday he would soon sign an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal resources.

Trump is highlighting concerns from some conservatives that their voices were being censored, whether on social media or at the nation’s universities. He did not go into more detail about what the order would say, but his comments immediately drew scrutiny from those who noted that public research universities already have a constitutional obligation to protect free speech.

https://t.co/PTLqvZNwqY

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2019

“An executive order is unnecessary as public research universities are already bound by the First Amendment, which they deeply respect and honor,” said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. “It is core to their academic mission.”

Trump invited Hayden Williams to join him Saturday while he addressed activists attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. Williams was punched Feb. 19 while on the campus of University of California, Berkeley. He was recruiting for the conservative group Talking Points USA.

Two men approached and one punched him during a confrontation captured on student cellphones. University of California, Berkeley police arrested a suspect, Zachary Greenberg, on Friday.

Williams, who had a black eye, told Fox News that the men objected to a sign that said “Hate Crime Hoaxes Hurt Real Victims.”

Neither Williams nor Greenberg are affiliated with UC Berkeley.

Trump told the audience Saturday that Williams “took a hard punch in the face for all of us.” Meanwhile, Williams said many conservative students face “discrimination, harassment or worse if they dare speak up on campus.”

Trump offered no details about what the executive order might say about what has become a thorny issue on college campuses.

DALLAS COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 1:30p.m. Saturday in Dallas County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2009 Acura driven by Henry J. Hekemeyer, 75, Jefferson City, was southbound on Highway 73 just south of Rainbow Road.  The vehicle traveled off the road, struck an embankment and overturned.

EMS transported the driver to Mercy Hospital in Springfield.

Lifeflight transported a passenger Phyllis A.  Heckemeyer, 71, Jefferson, to Mercy Hospital in Springfield where she died.  Both were properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.

ST. LOUIS (AP) — More than 400 pre-applications from potential marijuana growers and sellers have already been filed with the state of Missouri, months before licenses will be awarded.

St. Louis Public Radio reports that potential businesses have already paid more than $3 million in application fees, even though the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services won’t begin accepting formal applications for dispensaries, cultivation facilities and manufacturing plants until August.

Missouri voters approved a ballot measure in November allowing for marijuana to treat a wide variety of ailments. The state is still drafting rules and regulations for how the program will be operated.

“That is just astounding to me, the level of interest and excitement and willingness to make that level of investment at this early of a stage. But it does make me a bit nervous!” said Derek Mays, founder and CEO of REAL Cannabis Co. His group wants to open a combined cultivation, manufacturing and dispensing facility.

The state will distribute a minimum of 24 dispensary licenses to each of the eight congressional districts. In some districts, potential applicants already far exceed that number.

In Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, which comprises much of St. Louis and north St. Louis County, 36 hopeful dispensary owners have submitted fees. In the 5th Congressional District, which includes Kansas City, 58 businesses or individuals have submitted pre-application fees.

It costs $6,000 to apply for dispensing licenses or manufacturing licenses, and $10,000 to apply to run cultivation facilities. The applications are non-refundable and do not confer preferential treatment.

Turning in an application fee early won’t affect whether the state ultimately approves a license, health officials say. But Mays and others were eager to get the pre-applications in.

“I think that most people who are interested in getting into the industry somewhat felt, whether it’s psychological or not, we didn’t want to be one of the organizations that didn’t show the motivation, or, you know, support, for the process,” Mays said.

___

FAIRWAY, Kan. (AP) — Police have identified a man shot and injured in a gun battle with police across the street from an elementary school in suburban Kansas City.

Fairway police say 26-year-old Dylan Ruffin was injured Friday afternoon when he exchanged gunfire with officers who had been called to the home he was in directly across the street from Highlands Elementary School in the Shawnee Mission School District. Video shows a man believed to be Ruffin exiting the home and pointing a gun at officers, who fired, hitting Ruffin. No one else was injured.

Police say Ruffin was treated at a hospital and released. He is charged with three counts of aggravated assault on an officer and weapons counts. He is being held in the Johnson County Adult Detention Center on $500,000 bond.

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a 33-year-old woman injured in an Olathe apartment fire has died.

Alexandria Armstrong died Friday at a hospital where she had been taken in critical condition Thursday night after being pulled from the burning building.

Firefighters say the fire started in Armstrong’s apartment and appears to have been accidental. Investigators believe a damaged electrical cord ignited a couch and other nearby items.

No other injuries were reported.

ST. LOUIS — Charges have been filed against two Missouri day care center workers after surveillance video showing a 3-year-old girl being thrown against a cabinet went viral.

The woman accused of throwing the girl, 27-year-old Wilma Brown, was charged with felony child abuse on Thursday in St. Louis County. Relatives said the girl sustained a head gash that required seven stiches during the incident on Feb. 1 at Brighter Day Care and Preschool.

The girl’s family said they were initially told the girl fell, but five days later watched surveillance video with the center’s director that showed a worker throwing the child into a cabinet.

Detectives with the North County Police Cooperative arrested Wilma Brown at 1:48pm Friday in the 200 block of McAlpine. Brown was located inside the residence of an associate, hiding in a basement closet.

Prosecutors also charged 22-year-old Ariana Silver for a separate incident on Feb. 27 that was also allegedly captured by surveillance video. Charging documents allege Silver squeezed a 4-year-old girl’s arm and punctured her skin, and then carried the girl by her foot.

Silver is jailed on $50,000 bond. Jail records don’t show whether she has an attorney, and she doesn’t have a publicly listed home phone number.
Both women have been fired, according to Timothy Smith, an attorney for the day care center.

Smith said the center is cooperating with investigators and “has provided exemplary, high quality educational and child care services to thousands of children and their families for more than a decade.” The attorney said teachers and staff are properly trained, and the center works to provide a safe environment.

-The AP contributed to this report

By CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN

LIBERAL — Hefty college debt won’t saddle Bryan Medina.

He’s on a fast track to an energy career that he hopes will pave the road to family dreams: Buying his own cattle and going in on the purchase of 300 acres of land with his dad.

“We could grow and eventually own our own feedyard,” said Medina, who finished high school last May in the small southwest Kansas town of Sublette. “If things go great, if we put all the work into it, we’ll definitely get there.”

Medina had just one semester left of his natural gas studies at Seward County Community College in Liberal. Kansas footed much of the bill for him, meaning Medina can start banking paychecks faster toward those livestock purchases instead of pouring them into college loans.

“I left Wyoming Tech owing $17,000,” said David Ratzlaff, one of Medina’s instructors. “It took me about 10 years to pay that off.”

Savvy teens eyeing tech careers can get a leg up in life under a Kansas program that made college free for them while still in high school. Stories like Medina’s have generated buzz, and now some education officials and lawmakers are mulling how to help students shooting for non-technical careers, too.

Their idea? Let high school students who qualify academically take up to five popular college basics tuition-free, including algebra and English composition.

Cost and logistics could prove hurdles. The potential expenses of such a program remain unclear, as does legislative support amid the state’s gradual recovery from years of fiscal trouble.

New research on the dual credit boom in Texas also raises questions about how much money it really saves families. And it suggests dual credit mostly helps white students and those with more money, instead of the low-income and minority students policymakers want to put on a level playing field.

But if Kansas can smooth out the wrinkles, high school students see a way to build competitive college applications and get ahead, all while easing into more rigorous coursework. Many already enroll in dual credit at their own expense.

“It’s not as intimidating” starting college this way, said Nevaeh Bess, a Liberal High senior earning such credits at her own, familiar school. Her teachers explain class assignments and expectations clearly.

“That helps out a lot — knowing what your teacher is grading,” the aspiring anesthesiologist said. “I spoke to someone that is in college now, and she was like, ‘Well, sometimes I just don’t know what they’re looking for.’”

High stakes

For students plotting a direct course from high school to four-year colleges, taking dual credit may seem like an easy choice.

Students in Liberal pay around $300 per class. That’s less than a third of the price they’d pay as freshmen at the University of Kansas and many times cheaper than out-of-state tuition.

Liberal High senior Mica Watson-Huskey has her sights trained on a major in civil or aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin because of the school’s research opportunities.

Last year, she took college algebra and trigonometry, but she lost some of the credits when she couldn’t pay in full. High school students don’t qualify for financial aid that can take some of the sting out of tuition bills.

If the state paid for even a few dual credit courses, Watson-Huskey said, that would lift ambitions at a school where many families struggle to make ends meet.

“They would have the motivation to do a college class,” she said. “They wouldn’t be limited because of the amount of money.”

One thousand of the 1,300 students at Liberal High come from low-income families.

The school lies in a corner of the state where meat drives the economy. The thousands of slaughterhouse jobs in the region pay $14 an hour on average, an annual salary of just under $30,000 a year.

Many of the students here would be the first in their family to attend college. Most learn English as a second language and four out of five are Hispanic.

Nationally, Hispanics and people whose first language isn’t English are less likely to go to college than other Americans.

The vast majority of students at Liberal High graduate. But of those only a third quickly head to college or work on an industry certificate. Across Kansas more than half of high school graduates do.

Yet missing out on higher education shuts doors. Decent jobs still exist for people with no more than a high school diploma, but not to the extent they once did.

Economist Nicole Smith says those jobs continue to dwindle. Today, just three in 10 teens who stop their educations at high school can hope to find jobs that will pay at least $35,000 from their mid-20s through their early 40s and at least $45,000 after middle age.

What of the other seven?

“They’re going to be experiencing significant amounts of hardship,” Smith said. “Even to get a job, and far less to keep that job and to earn a living wage with it.”

Smith — chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce — co-authored studies on the changing job landscape. Those spurred Kansas and other states to ratchet up efforts to get more students to college.

Survival mode

That urgency has Kansas education officials hunting for ways to bridge the college gap — not just for go-getting teens planning careers in anesthesiology and engineering.

They hope free dual credit would plant the idea of higher education in more students’ minds, making it seem less scary, distant or unattainable.

“There are a lot of students that are college ready and college material,” said Jean Redeker, vice president for academic affairs at the Kansas Board of Regents. “But they don’t know it.”

Free tech classes have already built one bridge, college administrators say. They attract high school students whose families otherwise might not feel comfortable setting foot on a college campus — even just to ask questions.

 

In Liberal, many may not know about federal financial aid and generous local tuition grants. That leaves families feeling Seward County Community College “is only for people with money,” said Janeth Vazquez, who advises students there. “A goal that’s just too out of their hand.”

Vazquez gets it. Many are in survival mode. When she was a teen, her father was deported and she worked long hours after school helping to pay the mortgage, utility bills and other family needs.

“That was my story,” she said. “That was my life.”

Last year, the Kansas Senate passed a bill that would have kicked off free general education dual credit in a test program — paying for English composition for high schoolers.

It’s Kansas’ most popular non-tech dual credit class. Free access to algebra, psychology, public speaking and U.S. history would possibly have come in the following years.

The idea never got a vote in the House. It fell to the wayside amid the broader school finance battle in the Legislature — yearslong wrangling over court rulings that demand Kansas increase funding to local schools.

Recommendations for the dual credit legislation came from the Regents and Kansas State Department of Education. To qualify, they suggested students would generally need:

• A 3.0 GPA and a college-ready ACT score in math or English to take algebra or composition. Nationally, most ACT-takers hit the mark in English but not math.

• A 3.0 GPA and a 20 or higher composite ACT score to take any of the other three free classes. That’s a little below the national average composite score.

Logistical hurdles

Pinning down the potential cost to taxpayers has proved complicated.

Just how many of the state’s 70,000 high school upperclassmen would jump at an offer for free college English, algebra and more remains unclear. After the state rolled out free tech college classes in 2012, student enrollment in those more than doubled.

About 15,000 Kansas high school students took college dual credit at their high schools last school year. They took, on average, two classes each.

Then there’s the matter of calculating cost per student. The Board of Regents finished a study in December, but the state’s two dozen two-year colleges reported huge variations in cost per credit hour. English composition ranged from more than $900 per credit hour to $1.

 

The board suggested this month that if the Legislature offered to pay the median — $71 — and 17,000 students signed up, that would cost Kansas $3.6 million. That price point has community colleges concerned.

Some variation is inevitable. In addition to regional cost differences, colleges deliver dual credit through a variety of models. Some high school students travel to campus for class, or connect through remote video links and online tools. In other cases, colleges send professors to high schools or rely on high school teachers to run courses themselves.

Colleges and high schools would have to figure out how to ramp up capacity if English and other classes became free. The pilot proposal aims for a soft start that would buy time to identify and deal with hurdles.

Having high school teachers teach college classes only works when those instructors hold advanced degrees with significant relevant coursework. On the other hand, placing students in on-campus classes comes with potential transportation costs and difficulty aligning schedules, among other issues.

Administrators talk eagerly about the possibilities — enthusiasm tempered by the knowledge that logistics take time to solve. They worry, too, that they might build dual credit programs only to see the money disappear in a few years amid funding battles in the Legislature.

Even funding for the state’s free tech college program — popular with lawmakers across party lines — fell millions of dollars behind in recent years. That unsettles Seward County Community College president Ken Trzaska. A quarter of the students at his school now attend through that initiative.

“That program is a great program,” he said. At the same time, it’s a vulnerability. “If, suddenly, the funding goes away or that population of students go away, then that’s a huge hit.”

Good and bad news

Uneasy faculty at the University of Texas took the following question about dual credit to university brass: Might it inadvertently hurt freshmen? Some professors reported that students arriving with college basics out of the way struggled in next-level classes.

That prompted a two-year deep dive by UT into the outcomes of 130,000 students.

UT’s study and a separate one conducted by the American Institutes for Research both came out last summer, among the most ambitious dual credit studies to date.

They offer good and bad news from a state ripe for analysis. Texas has vigorously promoted early college credit for years. From 2000 to 2016, the number of high school students in dual-credit classes rose more than tenfold, topping 200,000 per year.

The bad news first:

• Dual credit didn’t save students much money. UT students saw a negligible impact on debt unless they showed up at college with a full two years of credit. Savings may elude many people because their credits don’t align with their degrees or they opt against graduating early.

• Past research oversold dual credit. Dual credit appeared to help students likely to succeed in college anyway. After factoring for that, college enrollment only ticked up by about 2 percentage points and graduation rates by an “insignificant” 1 percentage point. Many past studies touting robust benefits from dual credit fell short of standards for rigorous research.
• Dual credit doesn’t solve achievement gaps — it mostly helps white, more affluent students. Poor students who took it became less likely to go to or finish college. Black students became more likely to attend two-year colleges, but not to graduate. Hispanic students became more likely to finish a two-year, but not a four-year, degree.

Now, the good:

• Even if the benefits were less than previously touted, they were still statistically meaningful. Grade analyses and course comparisons also didn’t bear out faculty concerns that high school teachers might be watering down dual credit classes for their students.

• Even with evidence of less significant benefit, the cost of dual credit paid off many times over. Better college outcomes mean higher eventual incomes for dual credit students, who earn more money and consequently pay more tax revenue to the state.
• Dual credit does improve college prospects for some people. Though dual credit didn’t help poorer students as a whole, it did help the academic high-flyers among them to make it to college and graduate.

Kansas state Sen. Molly Baumgardner says some of the Texas findings point to problems unrelated to dual credit. Minorities enrolling but not graduating in larger numbers suggests colleges need to recognize that students need better support.

“They have a changing role,” she said.

Baumgardner, chair of the Senate’s education committee, spearheaded work on last year’s bill. In her combined 16 years of teaching high school and community college, she saw students grow when opportunity allows.

“Kids don’t really know their limits,” she said. “But they become limited if they’re told they can’t do something.”

This is Part Four in our series on college and careers. Don’t miss Part Oneon the advent of the “college economy,” Part Two on planning life after high school and Part Three on Kansas’ tech college boom.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @Celia_LJ.