Kansas Democratic Party edits video of Schmidt to mislead on school funding stance

The Kansas Democratic Party posted to social media Friday an edited and out-of-context video clip to suggest that Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, the Republican nominee for governor, opposes fully funding schools.

The party posted a looped snippet of a recent Fox News interview to show Schmidt repeating the phrase, “What good does it do to fully fund schools?”

But that clip is only half of Schmidt’s sentence in the unedited video in the full Fox News segment in which he makes a different point about schools.

“What good does it do to fully fund schools if you turn around and lock the children out of them?” Schmidt said in the unedited video. It’s an attack Schmidt has made against incumbent Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly throughout the campaign related to school closures in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schmidt’s campaign manager, C.J. Grover, posted the full clip to Twitter calling the Kansas Democratic Party’s edits “outright misinformation.”

Kelly’s decision to end in-person instruction in March of 2020 was in line with similar decisions being made by governors nationwide. But achievement test scores have dropped both nationally and in Kansas since the disruption to in-person instruction.

Kelly has stood by that decision saying repeatedly that she acted with the information she had at the time to protect the lives of students and teachers.

In a statement Emma O’Brien, a spokeswoman for the KDP, said Schmidt’s campaign’s complaints about the video “ring especially hollow” because the Republican Governors Association spent millions on an ad that similarly used an out-of-context clip of Kelly to suggest she was celebrating the possibility of a recession.

“It’s no surprise that Derek Schmidt and his team are panicking about Kansans learning the truth about his record – after supporting a bill that underfunded schools in the state Senate and defending Brownback’s tax cuts to public schools as Attorney General, he’s already proven that he can’t be trusted when it comes to fully funding public education,” O’Brien said.