HARRISONVILLE, Mo. (AP) – Authorities say human remains found in a wooded area near Kansas City belonged to a female homicide victim.

Mushroom hunters found the remains Saturday in Cass County near Harrisonville, about 35 miles (56.32 kilometers) south of Kansas City.

The sheriff’s office announced Monday that the case is a homicide but the victim’s identity has not been confirmed.

Authorities say the remains are not those of 17-year-old Desirea Ferris of Liberty, who has been missing for nearly a year.

It is the third time in a year that human remains have been found in Cass County woods.

HOUSTON, Mo. (AP) – A southern Missouri teenager is facing misdemeanor charges after he and a friend allegedly threw a puppy to its death from a fire lookout tower.

Texas County authorities say 17-year-old Taylor DeWolfe of Houston, Missouri, was charged last week with animal abuse and two other counts after the puppy was dropped more than 100 feet from the tower.

The Springfield News-Leader reports DeWolfe and his friend climbed the tower last week. A probable cause statement says DeWolfe told deputies the juvenile threw the dog off the tower.

DeWolfe told authorities after the friend bragged at school about the incident, he retrieved the dog’s body and left it in a field.

Online records don’t list an attorney for DeWolfe. It was not immediately clear if the juvenile is facing charges.

MIDDLE GROVE, Mo. (AP) – A rural Missouri man is charged with first-degree murder, accused of killing a woman with whom he had a secret romance two days before their wedding.

Fifty-one-year-old James Addie of Monroe County is accused of killing 35-year-old Molly Watson of Huntsville. Her body was found Friday night near a creek bed. The cause of death remains under investigation but police say wounds were consistent with blunt force trauma.

A probable cause statement says Addie told investigators that he has been married for 22 years but had planned to marry Watson on Sunday. Authorities believe Addie and Watson had been secretly dating for seven years.

Police say tire tracks near the body matched Addie’s Mercury Sable.

Addie is jailed on $500,000 bond and does not yet have an attorney.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) – Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley is supporting a Trump administration plan to ask people if they are citizens during the 2020 Census.

Hawley said Monday that asking a citizenship question “is common sense.” Hawley wasn’t among the dozen other Republican attorneys general who originally urged President Donald Trump’s administration to add the question.

A citizenship question hasn’t appeared on the census version sent to every household since 1950.

Numerous Democratic attorneys general have sued to try to block it. They contend a citizenship question will deter participation and infringe on a constitutional requirement to count all residents.

Hawley is challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Last month, McCaskill said the citizenship question was a “blatantly partisan” move to depress the count of Hispanics.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Latest on the Kansas Legislature’s debate on the state budget, school funding and tax issues (all times local):

4 p.m.

Kansas legislators have approved a bill that is designed to fix a flaw in a new education funding law that would have cost public schools $80 million.

The Senate’s 30-8 vote Monday sends the measure to Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer, and he has promised to sign it. The House approved the bill Saturday.

The new school funding law was supposed to phase in a $534 million increase in education funding in hopes of meeting a Kansas Supreme Court mandate to boost spending on public schools.

The law set a minimum for local property tax revenues to be raised by local school boards and counted those dollars toward the state’s total aid. Instead of adding local dollars to state dollars, the technical calculation inadvertently replaced state dollars with local dollars.

By CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN

Kansas senators will return Monday to find a school finance fix waiting on their desks, hammered out in the House over the weekend.

The bill undoes an $80 million error inserted last-minute into this year’s school funding bill.

“The overwhelming majority of our body wanted to make sure those funds were allowed to be given to the districts,” House Speaker Ron Ryckman said after the measure passed 92 to 27.  “It’s in the Senate’s hands now.”

Lawmakers passed the school funding bill earlier this month to meet a Kansas Supreme Court order that found current school spending insufficient and unfair to poorer school districts.

Lawmakers thought their bill would gradually add in more than $530 million to annual school spending over the next several years. Only when the dust of a dramatic weekend of political wrangling had settled did they discover that the true effect was less than that.

Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer signed the bill but urged lawmakers to fix it, and many legislators were on board with that message. They face a May 7 deadline to show the court their work — and to possibly put an end to seven years of litigation.

Democrats repeated their attempt from earlier this month to go beyond $530 million, which they say isn’t enough. (The plaintiffs in the court case agree.)

Rep. Jerry Stogsdill proposed adding around $300 million, an amendment that the body shot down. If it seems like a lot, Stogsdill said afterward, it’s only because the state has neglected school finance for seven years.

“Somebody has to be the adults in the room and make up for that neglect,” he said. “We wouldn’t be in this position if those Republican conservative legislators and the Republican conservative governor had done their constitutional duty and supported our public schools.”

Some conservative Republicans voted against the $80 million fix, and 20 signed a statement calling the legislation passed Saturday a reversal of important policy.

“This is not a good way to legislate,” they said.

The $80 million error arose when lawmakers voted earlier this month to count as state aid certain money that school districts raise by taxing local property owners.

The House’s fix walks that back, thereby upsetting some conservatives. It still asserts the money should be considered state funding and the Supreme Court should count it that way. But it doesn’t fold the amount into the state’s basic per-pupil aid.

The latter was a change in math from previous practice that led to the $80 million funding decrease by inadvertently displacing state dollars that lawmakers intended schools to receive.

Getting the Senate to sign off on the plan won’t necessarily be easy. Some conservative Republicans don’t like the change. The original school finance bill passed with the bare minimum number of votes amid a filibuster by conservative Republicans there.

Sen. Ty Masterson decried the bill in a statement Saturday, accusing the House of “shell game tactics” and of using a procedural move that will prevent senators from proposing amendments to its work.

That’s “the exact same tactic used to ram the flawed bill through the process earlier this month,” Masteron said.

Mark Tallman, a lobbyist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said the House’s proposal does seem to resolve the $80 million error, but it remains unclear what the Kansas Supreme Court will make of the $530 million infusion.

“It’s still a very open question as to whether this will be enough,” he said. “It’s certainly a substantial improvement over last year.”

Last year the Legislature approved a two-year phase-in of about $300 million for schools.

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

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) – A former southwest Missouri school employee won’t serve more time for sexually abusing two boys on a school bus as it was headed to a Springfield zoo.

The Springfield News-Leader reports that 28-year-old Garrett Stark was sentenced Friday in Greene County to 15 years. But that sentence will be served at the same as another 15-year-old sentence for child sexual abuse that was imposed previously in Webster County.

Authorities say Stark worked in a Logan-Rogersville School District program that provided child care and also as a substitute teacher until July 2016, when a bus camera showed him molesting a 6-year-old and a 7-year-old.

The father of one of the boys cried while talking about what happened. He says he and his son have spent “many nights crying together.”

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Senate has approved budget legislation that would restore some past spending cuts for the state’s higher education system.

The vote Monday was 28-12 on a bill adding $47 million in new spending to the state’s current budget and the one for the next fiscal year that begins in July. Both annual budgets total more than $16 billion.

The bill includes $18 million for state universities to reverse cuts made in their operating budgets in 2016.

The measure goes next to the House. The House approved its own legislation Saturday and negotiators for the two chambers expect to draft the final version of the budget bill this week.

Senators also expected to consider another bill that would fix a flaw in a new law increasing education funding.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) – The Latest on the investigations of Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (all times local):

Noon

Missouri’s attorney general is reviewing Republican Gov. Eric Greitens’ social media use, but a Greitens spokesman says there’s no basis to subject those accounts to the Sunshine law.

Attorney General Josh Hawley spokeswoman Mary Compton in a Monday statement said if a state employee operated social media accounts, the state Sunshine law might apply to some or all account records. That would mean they could be subject to public-records requests.

The Kansas City Star on Friday reported that it asked Hawley’s office about emails that appear to show Greitens’ spokesman Parker Briden’s involvement in a draft post. The emails were written before the governor’s office created official social media accounts.

Briden in response said the issue has already been settled. He noted that the attorney general previously chose not to take any action related to the governor’s Facebook and Twitter use.

WARSAW, Mo. (AP) – Authorities say a man has drowned while fishing at Truman Lake.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol identified the victim as 67-year-old Sherman Wright, of Warsaw.

The patrol says the Corps of Engineers responded Sunday after Wright’s boat was found floating and unoccupied on the lake. A dragging operation began, and Wright was found next to his fishing line, which was tangled in a tree.