Local election candidate Q&A

Interviews with candidates running for Kansas Department of Education District Two, Kansas House District 48, Kansas House District 16 and Kansas House District Eight.

Ellie Votypka and Inaya Zaman

November 2, 2024

A picture of a sticker voters receive after voting. The last day to cast your vote is Nov. 5.

Madison Kraft

In preparation for the upcoming local elections, BVNWnews interviewed the candidates for the Kansas State Board of Education, Kansas State Senate and Kansas State House of Representatives for districts around the Blue Valley Northwest area. We reached out to all those running for these positions and included the interviews of those who responded. They shared their key beliefs and policies, providing voters with a concise overview of their platforms. Scroll below to read what they had to say.

Kiel Corkran for KSDE District Two

Q: Why did you decide to pursue a career in public service?

A: "I've worked for the federal government before, at the IRS for a few years, and so I've seen at the federal level, and kind of like an idea I [had] was, you just want to help people. Yeah, that's a big idea. I just want to help."

Q: What policies and values are you trying to bring up if you get elected?

A: "There's a bigger one about just inclusivity in school. We don't want people being picked on because of their own sexual orientation or how they identify themselves as their gender, or the pronouns they use. [The] school board can't ban book bannings, but it can stop and oversee what material [they] teach in multiple books. You can create intended policies to focus on which we don't like a book, because it's, you know, it [has] a gay frog with it. Who cares? It's if you [go] about it, then you're going to be damaging the child. They're better to learn not to feel bad about themselves because of how they feel or how they view themselves. A policy would be, we would try to learn with the book, book bannings and then so part of it, like I said, they enforce policy, and then they enforce material for like what they learned. I would like to see more diversity and material outside, school board, our schools, that are, just kind of reinforce our idea that capitalism is the ultimate envy of everything. You get [an] education, just to get a job, and then that's it. That's the only way to create, which is to get a job so we can make money, you're done. We would want more opportunities just to try to get people to think a little bit differently, not just focusing on STEM, focus on all areas of academics."

Q: What would you like to say to potential voters about you and your campaign?

A: "I would ask people just to take a chance here, because it's not, this isn't a campaign that's founded by the two corporate parties. So we're not trying to just do more of the same. I think one of my opponents, Melanie, is a Democrat, and she's running on digital safety. [Kids] should be safe when they're in school, and they should learn how to use Internet safety, which is fair, but it's already in a push. It's not really what we want to do here. We need more than just status quo stuff. Yeah, 100 percent like, they can be safe at school, right? They can be safe on digital. Also, what's pushing them to think, is this really all education is supposed to be: get a job and then forget about [more] stuff."
Melanie Haas for KSDE District Two

Q: What policies and values are you trying to bring up if, when you get if you get elected again, or just continue?

A: “I really want the opportunity to just continue a lot of the good work that the board has been doing and that I've gotten to be a part of. There are ten seats on the State Board of Education, and every two years, so every even-numbered year, half of those seats are up because we serve four-year terms. Right now, all the even-numbered seats are up, and then in two years, all the odd-numbered seats will be up. Last January, when we seated three new board members after that November election, every two years, we also elect a new chair. I was elected chair in January of 2023, and so that's been an opportunity for me to bring my leadership skills, kind of from the corporate side in my other career, to bring those skills to the board and really serve in a leadership role, just trying to make sure that our board members have all of the information that they feel individually, that they need to make decisions when they're at the table. I try to also kind of guide them through the process as best I can, so that if they feel like they don't have the information, I can kind of guide them down the path of how they learn more about whatever the issue at hand is. What I really want to be able to do, though, is continue some of the things we don't change a lot. The State Board does not really write new laws the way that the legislature does. We are responsible for some policy decisions, though, and so one of the things that I got to work on in the last four years was that we updated graduation requirements, and it was a whole lot of work. It was about 18 months of work for a task force of people that got together and met on a regular basis and invested a lot of time for what ultimately, on paper, ended up looking like a very little change. We tweaked requirements around English Language Arts and Physical Education, and really my goal in that process was to make sure that we were making changes that would benefit students directly so that they would have more agency in the choices that they're making in high school, around what classes they take and then how that affects their post-secondary success. My own daughter said early on in her high school career, ‘What if I just want to spend five years in high school because there are so many cool electives that I want to take?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don't recommend you spend five years, but I completely hear you that there are a lot of me classes, and so if there's any way that we could create, you know, some more space for career exploration and getting to try out a class or an area of interest so that you can figure out that maybe this is something I like, or, no, I actually learned that I really don't like that.’ Great. Now you can check that off the list and say, ‘Okay, I learned a valuable thing here by realizing that I don't like, pick a field, and won't pick on any field,’ so that then you can move on and keep looking for the things that really resonate with you as a student.”

Q: What are some of the most important issues that you would like to address?

A: “I think that right now we're continuing, even four years after COVID-19 started, we're continuing to see a lot of distrust of our educators, and the way that that really manifests is that we end up seeing a lot of educators that are leaving the profession, and so anything that we can do at the state board level to just continue to be very supportive of teachers, which would look like ensuring that our public schools continue to receive the funding that they need. While we don't get to allocate those funds, we do get to weigh in on the governor's budget, and the courts are frequently looking to the state board's conversations and decisions. So in the past, Kansas has had to go through a couple of different periods of time where there were lawsuits that were brought at the state level to try to restore funding for schools after that money had been taken away, and when those events have happened, when those court cases have happened in the past, the conversations and actions taken by the state board were taken into account in those cases. While we don't have a direct voice, I think that what we do is we still take a leadership role and our conversations matter. I really want to do everything we can to support teachers at our schools.”

For more information about Melanie Haas visit her website Melanie Haas State Board of Education.
Dan Osmund for Kansas House District 48

Q: What policies and values are you trying to bring up if you get elected?

A: "I am in office right now. Actually, I've been representing the district for the last three years now, and the biggest things for me include making sure that our education system is fully funded, and that includes special education, that we uphold a woman's right to choose and bodily autonomy so that the government is not reaching into healthcare decisions for anybody. Yeah, just honestly walking around the neighborhood and finding out what my constituents want so that I can best represent them up in Topeka."

Q: What are the most important issues you want you would like to address?

A: "As I said, education is one. There's a lot of other things; I think the biggest thing that we in the legislature could deal with, and have consistently failed to do so, is the expansion of Medicaid. 40 states have passed this. This is not a Democrat issue or Republican issue. This affects every single person in the state of Kansas, and from a monetary perspective, from a health perspective, and we in Kansas aren't doing our jobs when we're not passing Medicaid expansion of Medicaid."

Q: What would you like to say to the potential voters about you or your campaign?

A: "I want to tell people, regardless of whether they're [eligible to vote] because I know that a number of students at Blue Valley Northwest are not eligible to vote, and that's fine. They live in my district. If they live in my district, they're a constituent of mine and I think the biggest thing is they can get in contact with me. And my email address is [email protected] and if they have any concerns, if they have any issues that they want me to advocate on their behalf, have them reach out. That's what I'm here for."

Q: What are the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the current group you are running for?

A: "You know, I think the biggest thing that we're going to deal with next year is the education budget. There was a Supreme Court decision that was handed out probably about a decade ago, that fixed the funding formula, and we basically adhered to it for the last 10 years now, but the Supreme Court has now said we don't need to apply that any longer. So, the legislators that get in next year make the determination of what fully funded is. They make the determination of how much special education funding a school district is going to get and that is extremely important, that we have legislators that support public education and support the growth of public schools."

For more information about Dan Osmund visit his campaign website, Dan Osmund for Kansas House.
Randy Ross for Kansas House District 48

Q: What career background did you have prior to this?

A: "For the last 25-ish years, my business partner and I had a strategic marketing consulting company, and we would work with healthcare companies to help them do a better job of reaching out to their customers. So they would come to us and say, ‘You know, we're just not having success with our messaging, and we're trying to reach people,’ and so what was really fun was you kind of start to diagnose where their problems are, and many more times than not the problem was not that they couldn't communicate with the customer. They couldn't communicate with each other in the company. Nobody. Everybody was stubborn about their opinion. Nobody really wanted to compromise and so there were just a lot of turf battles. And so, you know, we did that, and we learned how to get people to kind of break down, and start to see other sides within their own company before they could even focus on the customer. And so I was done, you know, I was thinking about (how I have) always had that interest in state government, and it's kind of like, wait a minute, people that can't get along, they can't see the other side, they struggle to find solutions. I said, ‘That's state government.’ I've been kind of working with this problem, you know, for 20-some years, and that's exactly what goes on there sometimes when they can't get things, yeah, or get them done efficiently. So it was kind of a nice segue into a second career, no, but an opportunity to serve for a few years maybe, and you don't see what I can do over there and let somebody else do it [well]."

Q: What policies and values are you trying to bring up if you get elected?

A: "Education is really the cornerstone. If we didn't have the Blue Valley system performing at the level that it is. I mean, you guys set the bar, and you set the bar for private schools in the area as well, because they you know, if they're inferior, who's going to go there, right? So you guys set the bar pretty high, and so I want to keep it set that high. And so we have to fully fund (education.) Number two is fiscal responsibility, and that kind of goes back to the affordability of areas, but on a state level, we just put some tax cuts in place. But you know, we [have] some tax cuts through the legislature this year. I think we need to do more because, you know, I only want to take from people what is absolutely necessary to make things run. But in order to lower taxes and take less money out of people's pockets we gotta pay our bills. Remember, no deficit spending. So that means you have to focus on the budget. And the budget is what creates the invoices, the taxes are meant to pay for the state, and we're, we're just starting to get the legislature more involved in the budgetary process. The third thing is cybersecurity. And I'm sure you guys talk about that in different classes, the state's been rated twice within about the last four years. During COVID-19, we were paying out a lot of unemployment compensation because a lot of people were out of work, foreign bad actors figured out how to game our unemployment system and walked off with almost half a billion dollars. Where I come from, that's a lot of money, but you know, that's not money. We're not going to get back, and the taxpayers are the ones that paid it. And you know, when you start to look at that, you're going, ‘How'd that happen?’ So they've got back into investigating and quite frankly, we really weren't doing a good job of paying attention to our cyber security. Well, you would think that we would learn from that and say, ‘Okay, you know, we're going to fix this problem,’ and then let's check and make sure all the other doors are locked. I think the state has a responsibility not only to secure itself but also to make sure that other targets around the state are aware because if we harden all the targets, the bad actors will go somewhere else. They'll try to find targets that are easier to infiltrate. Yeah, those are the three things, okay, that I would like to get accomplished over the next few years."

For more information about Randy Ross visit his website Randy Ross for House District 48.
Linda Featherson for Kansas House District 16

Q: What are some of the most important issues that you would like to address?

A: "I think the most important issue we're going to have [is] probably taxes, but I'm actually going to say the school funding formula is going to be rewritten in this next term, and that's going to be extremely important for my district, and really for the whole state. So I'm gonna say the school funding formula, but I get that tax plan goes weird. We won't have any money to fund schools. Funding school is so important. Number one, the Kansas Constitution requires that we fund public schools adequately and appropriately. So that's number one. Number two, schools are the backbone of society. They establish our workforce. They're the equalizer among all and would keep the state going forward."

Q: What policies and values are you trying to bring up if you get elected?

A: "Probably the thing they need to know this year is that I don't have an opponent, so I am running unopposed. So you're not going to see a lot of mail and ads for me this year. You will see me out helping other candidates, but I think the number one thing I would want my constituents to know is that I am here to work for them. I'm not a career politician. This is a community service job to me and serving the community is the best thing I can do in this job."

Q: Is there anything else you would like to say?

A: "I think I would just encourage any of your students, I know you'll have some that are 18 and eligible to vote. So I would just really encourage our young people to get out to vote because you all have the power to flip elections. There are so many of you, and that's great. And I would just really encourage everybody to get out and vote."

For more information about Linda Featherson visit her website Linda Featherson State Representative.
Beneé Hudson for Kansas House District Eight

Q: What was your career background prior to this?

A: "I have a wide range of disciplines acquired throughout my professional career. (Telecommunication, healthcare, human resource management, information technology and data science.) "

Q: What policies and values are you trying to bring up if you get elected?

A: "I am hoping to address food security and safety. We are becoming an unhealthier country which is leading to depression, anxiety, mental health issues and overall health decline. We need to identify [the] root cause and I have some ideas on how to get this conversation started in Topeka."

Q: Are there any things that are the main focus of your campaign?

A: "Putting people ahead of politics. I like to use the term, "serving the people." Politicians like to use the term "represent." There is a huge difference in those characterizations and an even bigger disparity in heart posture. One gives the people the power, (as it should,) the other insinuates the politician holds the power over the people."

Q: What would you like to say to potential voters about you or your campaign?

A: "My focus is to protect the American dream for all Kansans. I want a future for all young people that motivates them to achieve great things. To be able to get a job, whether through a four-year college or a trade school. To not be saddled with student loan debt. To own a home and start families. To not tax seniors out of their homes with property taxes. To have you keep more of your hard-earned wages to spend as you see fit."

Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?

A: "I would love for students to be more involved in government and understand social media is not the place to qualify your support for a person or legislation. Win or lose, I'd like to make it my mission to provide students with the tools to get to the truth about the machine we call politics."

The responses given were received over email.

Story continues below advertisement

About the Contributors

Ellie Votypka, Writer

Ellie Votypka is a senior at BVNW and this is her first year as a writer for “The Express”. Outside of newspaper Ellie is the executive producer of Husky Headlines, president of BVNW NHS, a member of quill and scroll, sources of strength, relay for life and KAY club. In her free time she enjoys spending time with friends and family, traveling, shopping and babysitting. Ellie is excited for the upcoming school year as a senior on staff!

Inaya Zaman, News Editor

Inaya Zaman is a Junior and the News Editor of The Express. This is her second year on staff. Along with being a part of the newspaper, Inaya is the Script Producer for Husky Headlines, a Project Manager for NEHS, in Spanish Honors Society Leadership, a Quill and Scroll member and is a member of KAY Club. In her free time she likes to read, hang out with friends, listen to music and bake. She is looking forward to expanding the reach of The Express another great year on staff!

Madison Kraft, Online Editor

In her junior year and second time on staff, Madison is excited to be back as the Online Editor of BVNW News. Along with being in Newspaper, she is also involved in varsity track and cross country, NEHS, Gold Out KC and Quill and Scroll. In her valued free time, Madison enjoys cooking, watching movies and sleeping. This year, she is excited to be back for another year on staff and work on improving the website every day.