If there is one culture in Kansas that is isolated from nearly every other, it’s probably K-12 education—your local school district.
There are Kansans who like that isolation, making sure that school board members are not tied to a political party, that they don’t get suggestions from “someone upstream” either politically or through the finance of their election campaigns. Makes sense to some.
There are Kansans who think that isolation essentially makes those school board members less representative of the public that elects them and whose children are in school, and more responsive to the district’s administrators than to the taxpayers who help support the schools.