Kansas Hero’s Scholarship

The Kansas hero's scholarship act, 75-4364, requires every Kansas postsecondary educational institution to enrol certain people without charge of tuition or fees. It covers community colleges, the municipal university, state educational institutions, the institute of technology at Washburn University, and technical colleges. Four groups qualify on the military side. Any dependent or spouse of a Kansas resident who died while serving in military service. Any dependent or spouse of a Kansas resident who sustained a service-connected injury or disability that rendered the servicemember incapable of continuing their military service. This is a medical separation test rather than a rating test, and it does not ask for a percentage. Any dependent or spouse of a Kansas resident who is entitled to compensation from VA for a service-connected disability of at least 80 percent. Eighty is a threshold Kansas uses nowhere else in this catalog, and it reaches the families of living veterans, which most state dependent-tuition programmes do not. And any prisoner of war, in person. A prisoner of war for this purpose is someone who was a Kansas resident at the time they entered service and who, while serving, was declared a prisoner of war by the Secretary of Defense after January 1, 1960. The act also covers dependents and spouses of public safety officers killed or disabled on duty, which is why the definitions of accident, injury, intentional act of violence and repetitive trauma take up most of the section. "Military service" is defined broadly: any active service in any armed service of the United States and any active state or federal service in the Kansas army or air national guard. State active duty in the Guard counts. The limit is ten semesters of undergraduate instruction, or the equivalent, across all such institutions combined. "Fees" means charges required of every student as a condition of enrolment, and expressly does not include other charges associated with the academic programme or living costs, so books, housing and course-specific fees remain payable. The constraint nobody mentions is in the first line of subsection (c)(1). The obligation runs only "up to the aggregate limit for such financial assistance established for each academic year by the state board of regents based on the annual appropriated amounts." Institutions are reimbursed from an appropriation, and when the appropriation for the year is exhausted the entitlement stops. This is not an uncapped statutory right, and a late applicant in a heavy year can find the money gone. If a recipient discontinues attendance before the end of a semester after the institution has been paid, the institution repays the state the amount the student would otherwise have had refunded, up to the payment made. Residency is domiciliary residency as defined by 76-729, and the residency test attaches to the servicemember rather than to the student.