Kansas National Education Association: A History of Advocacy and Influence

The Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) stands as a prominent voice for educators in the state, advocating for policies and resources that support public education. As a state-level affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA), KNEA brings together members, Kansans, and the nation to fulfill the promise of public education. KNEA is driven by a vision of a great public school for every student.

Formation and Evolution

Founded in 1863 as the Kansas State Teachers’ Association, the organization later transitioned to its current name, the Kansas National Education Association, in 1969. In its early days, there was no state education department or mandatory school attendance. The organization has evolved from a mutual support network to a powerful advocate for teachers' rights and educational improvements. A group of ten state education associations founded the organization as the National Teachers Association (NTA) in 1857. The organization adopted its current name in 1870. It merged with the majority-Black American Teachers Organization in 1964.

To mark its 150th anniversary, KNEA president Karen Godfrey and others gathered Oct. 1 at a park in Leavenworth to dedicate a ginkgo tree as a symbol of longevity and resilience. Leavenworth is where a group of educators created the Kansas State Teachers Association, the organization that later became the KNEA.

Core Beliefs and Values

KNEA's work is guided by a set of core values, foremost of which is an unwavering belief in equal opportunity. The organization believes that public education is the gateway to opportunity and the cornerstone of our republic. Recognizing the critical role of educators, KNEA emphasizes that the expertise and judgment of education professionals are critical to student success. Furthermore, KNEA believes individuals are strengthened when they work together for the common good.

Leadership and Structure

The KNEA is led by a team of dedicated individuals in various leadership positions, including the KNEA President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer, Board of Directors, Executive Director, and Associate Executive Director.

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Sherri Schwanz serves as KNEA President, leading the state’s largest union of education professionals. With a strong educational background, including a Bachelor of Music Education from Baker University and a Masters of Educational Leadership from Pittsburg State University, Sherri has dedicated her career to leadership and advocacy. She has held various leadership roles in her school district, KNEA, and NEA, serving on committees and as a mentor. Sherri is actively involved in professional development and has presented to educators across the state.

Kimberly Howard, KNEA Vice President, is a K-5 ESL teacher in Wichita USD 259. She has a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and master’s degrees in School Leadership and Curriculum and Instruction in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Within her local, United Teachers of Wichita (UTW), Kimberly has served in many leadership positions, including President, Vice President, Secretary, and contributed to many committees focused on labor management and professional development. At the state level, Kimberly has served as KNEA Secretary-Treasurer, chaired the KNEA Budget and Audit Committee, and participated in multiple KNEA committees and commissions.

Jonathan Eshnaur is a dedicated high school special education teacher at Olathe Northwest High School with experience at Salina South High School and Kenneth Henderson Middle School. He holds a Bachelor's degree in secondary social studies from Wichita State University and a Master's degree in Secondary Special Education from Kansas State University. Jonathan's passion for education is influenced by his own schooling at Norwich schools in Kansas and his family's teaching background. He actively contributes to association activities, holds leadership positions at the local and state levels, and currently serves as Secretary-Treasurer, chairing important committees and being a member of the KNEA Executive Committee and Board of Directors.

Dr. David Fernkopf is the Executive Director of the Kansas National Education Association (KNEA). With more than fifteen (15) years of experience in education, David has held various leadership roles, including Assistant Director on the Career Standards and Assessment Services Team at the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) and Elementary Principal at Overbrook Attendance Center. He also has served as an Adjunct Professor at Fort Hays State University. David earned his Doctorate in Educational Leadership and a Master's in School Leadership from Baker University, along with a Bachelor's in Elementary Education from Washburn University. David's commitment to education extends beyond his professional duties. He has been a dedicated member of the KNEA, serving in various capacities, including local officer, Diversity Trainer, and Board Member. His involvement in the Kansas Children Service League (KCSL) as a Board of Directors member and his current role on the Board of Trustees further demonstrate his commitment to community service. Known for his strong leadership and commitment to education, David is dedicated to advancing the interests of educators and students alike.

Other key personnel include:

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Konza: Dr.
NEA State Director A: Brian Skinner
NEA State Director B: Jill Johnson
ESP Representative: Tara Florentin
Ethnic Minority Representative: Leanne Richardson
Higher Education Representative: Dr.

Advocacy and Policy Positions

The Kansas NEA engages in policy advocacy in support of its perceived interests and works to promote left-of-center policies in general. The Kansas NEA supports common teachers’ union public policy priorities such opposing vouchers and other educational choice options, increasing funding for public schools, expanding pensions and other retirement benefits, enforcing teacher licensure requirements, adopting college debt forgiveness for teachers, and expanding teacher tenure protections.

School Funding Lawsuits

The Kansas National Education Association supported a series of lawsuits in the 2010s colloquially known as the “Gannon case” in which school districts and students challenged the state’s school funding policies. The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state government had violated its state constitutional requirement to make “suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state,” and in a series of rulings the court forced the state legislature and governor to meet education spending targets over the course of multiple years. The Kansas Supreme Court finally ended its oversight of Kansas’s annual education budget in 2024.

Teacher Due Process Rights

Public school teachers in Kansas are employed on automatically renewing one-year contracts, and before 2014, Kansas law gave tenured teachers the ability to challenge a decision not to renew their contract for the next school year. In 2014, a new Kansas law effectively eliminated that process for K-12 teachers by redefining “teacher” in the statutory due process law to include only teachers and instructors at community colleges and technical colleges. The KNEA represented two Butler County, Kansas K-12 teachers who had lost their jobs and filed a challenge to the new law, arguing that their due process rights had been violated. In 2018, the Kansas Supreme Court rejected that argument, ruling that the state legislature’s passage of the law in accordance with the state’s constitution satisfied due process. Since 2018, restoration of those statutory due process provisions for K-12 public school teachers has been a major public policy priority for the KNEA.

Collective Bargaining

While the Kansas NEA bargains with school districts on behalf of its members, it is unable to legally call strikes as a negotiating tactic as such strikes are illegal under Kansas law. The last teachers’ strike in Kansas was in 1973, when teachers represented by the now-defunct Seaman District Teachers’ Association engaged in an illegal strike and courts upheld the district’s authority to discipline or fire them.

Key victories include 1970 bargaining rights act. When Schauner started teaching in the 1960s, teachers didn’t have the right to negotiate contracts.

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Political Alignment

It is closely aligned with the Democratic Party and regularly endorses Democratic candidates for public office. In October 2015, NEA President Lily Eskelsen García announced that the NEA would endorse 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The National Education Association proudly supports Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Clinton is a strong leader who will do what is best for America’s students. For more than four decades, Clinton has fought to make sure all children have a fair opportunity to succeed regardless of their ZIP code.

Challenges and Criticisms

Beginning in the mid-2010s, the Kansas National Education Association has seen teachers in multiple school districts vote to decertify the Kansas NEA as their union. Dissatisfaction with the KNEA’s results at the bargaining table and unhappiness with the state and national unions’ positions on social issues and political activism are widely cited as reasons for these decisions. The Kansas NEA has placed obstacles in the way of teachers attempting to leave it, engaging in various efforts to keep the Kansas Department of Labor from holding formal decertification elections. Some of these decertification efforts have been supported by the Kansas affiliate of the Association of American Educators (AAE), a non-union membership organization for educators.

One of the KNEA’s critics is Sen. Greg Smith, a conservative Republican from Overland Park and a high school history teacher in the Shawnee Mission school district. Smith says tenure has gone too far, shielding poor teachers from termination. Unions also inflate salaries, he says, and teacher pay should be linked to talent, not educational attainment and years of experience.

The National Education Association was widely criticized by civil rights activists in the 1950s for its unwillingness to alienate its members in southern states by endorsing and promoting school desegregation. Supreme Court decision eliminating “separate but equal” segregated schools, Brown v. Board of Education, centered on the education being provided to students in Topeka, Kansas. Supreme Court supporting the plaintiffs’ efforts to desegregate Topeka’s schools, the National Education Association did not take a position on the case at the time and did not formally endorse it until seven years later.

KNEA's Role in Shaping Education

For David Schauner, the KNEA’s chief attorney and a former teacher, the story of teachers unions in Kansas is one of improving public education. “The association has never been shy about standing up and saying that teachers matter,” Schauner said. “That schools matter. That your kids matter.”

Bruno said the story is similar from state to state. Teachers unions generally began as something akin to clubs, where members offered mutual support. Later they began advocating major changes to the profession and to public schools. That meant everything from better professional standards to adding nurses and psychologists. In the 1960s and 1970s, they won bargaining rights in some states, including Kansas, and that, he said, helped reduce sexism and cronyism. Unions pushed for equal pay for female teachers and higher standards for principals. Until then, he said, many principals had gotten jobs only because they had contacts on the school board.

Projects and Initiatives

KNEA has been involved in various projects and initiatives aimed at improving education and supporting teachers. These include:

Constitution Hall Project: Training teachers on primary source-based teaching strategies and co-constructing educational programming for use at the historic site.
Native American Education Project: Shifting Kansas educators from teaching superficially stereotypical content to high-quality, inquiry-based lessons and activities that make meaningful changes to their classroom practice regarding Native Americans.
Lyon County History Center Project: Training teachers in the Lyon County area to effectively use primary sources to create lesson plans and content-based assessments.
ESSDACK Projects: Gathering members of the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy TPS Consortium Interest Group (CIG) to share the state of culturally relevant pedagogy within their own states and discuss its role within their organizations. Increasing the ability of middle school-level teachers in rural Kansas school districts to integrate culturally inclusive literature alongside social studies content. Increasing the content mastery of American history teachers and media specialists, especially with regard to the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression in Kansas.
William Allen White Community Partnership: Targeting social studies and English language arts teachers in grades K-5 from the Emporia Public Schools and beyond to develop hands-on primary source lesson plans and supplemental materials.
Johnson Community College, Kansas Studies Institute Collaboration: Training middle school and high school teachers of social studies and history about best practices for incorporating primary sources into their classrooms.
Emporia State University Projects: Demonstrating how the theory of multiple intelligences can be used as the framework for creating primary source lesson plans and activities. Modifying the curriculum for two secondary social science methods courses to incorporate TPS materials and instruction on the effective use of primary sources. Enabling middle and high school teachers to identify and utilize primary sources that are close to home.
Kansas Historical Society Projects: Training teachers in grades K-6 to navigate the Library of Congress, as well as interpret and incorporate primary sources into their instruction. Working with social studies and history teachers in grades 6-12 and library media staff on how to effectively implement primary sources into their classroom instruction.
Kansas State University Projects: Providing a week-long seminar to in-service history educators. Instructing pre-service history and elementary school teachers on the use of primary sources from the digital archives of the Library of Congress.

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