The Kansas Board of Regents met yesterday on Emporia State’s campus to hold their monthly meeting. During the meeting they discussed community and technical colleges and voiced concerns about the Wichita Area Technical college and Wichita State University merger proposal.

“We are very supportive of the merger,” said Kimberly Kull, representative for  Kansas Association of Community Colleges Trustees, the chair of the Council of Presidents and president of Butler Community College. “We think that any time there can be collaboration between institutions that strengthen through merger or affiliation that’s a tremendous plus for the system. Our concern though is we want to make sure we understand the funding and we want to make sure that the two year sector funding is protected through that merger.”

The concern is that through this merger there would then be an opportunity for large institutions to somehow have access to limited funds that community and technical colleges have now as a two year sector, according to Kull.

“Right now, through tier funding, the technical and community college funding amounts do not quite (reach) 56 million dollars and our non-tiered funding, which goes to general education, is just over 73 million so that’s 129 million dollars total for all general education and technical education that we offer in a two year sector,” Kull said. “We serve 120 thousand students in the two year sector and no new funds have really been appropriated to the tiered funding since 2013 when there was an 8 million dollar refusion and really no funds that have been sent to the general education sites since FY(Fiscal Year) 2008.”

According to the Legislative Research Appropriations Report, Wichita State’s state agency SGF request for 2015 is nearly 71 million dollars.

That’s really more than all of the tiered funding that two institutions get and nearly as much as the non-tiered funding that they receive as well, according to Kull.

“Our concern through the merger is that there would be an opportunity for Wichita state, with the size that it is, to push down to the two-year level some of it’s mission and have an institution where a four year institution is changing the mission of that two year institution,” Kull said. “We’re just trying to protect the funding that we have.”

What the merger is trying to do is position South Central Kansas to allow the two institutions to rebuild the economy in that area to support their workers, to support their people and to do so in a manner that is reasonable and totally connected to the business community, according to John Bardo, Wichita State University President.

  “ What we are attempting to do with this legislation is to give us the maximum flexibility to figure out what this thing might look like and how to operate,” Bardo said. “What we know is that the old model is not the model that will propel us forward. This is about business competitiveness and workforce in the area.”

The Kansas Association of Technical Colleges did not take a stance on the issue due to president of the group being absent so they were unable to review the draft and come up with a position of the merger but they support the merge and share the concerns already mentioned, according to Eric Burks, president of North Central Technical College.

Since the proposal was on its first reading, KBOR did not make any decision on the merger.  The next KBOR meeting will be Dec. 14 and 15.