Despite a reported uptick in student violence at the elementary level, the Lansing USD 469 declined to take action at the January 12, 2026, meeting.
According to Lansing Board of Education member Kirsten Workman, parents approached the board last November to address concerns about their children being harmed in classrooms by other students, frequent classroom evacuations, and a lack of communication with parents about the ongoing issues.
“We have seen an uptick in complaints of discipline issues and safety issues at one of our schools in the district, and it’s what we’re hearing,” Workman said in a phone interview. “This is not a new problem. We’ve had teachers approach us over a year ago about issues related to violence — student-on-teacher violence and student-on-student violence in the younger grades, mostly from students who are just emotionally dysregulated.”
By “younger grades,” Workman said she meant incidents such as a student destroying their classroom in first and third grade classes.
“So [the parents] brought those concerns to the board,” she said. “They asked us to have a plan to address it and hold the adults responsible by December’s board meeting.”
Workman said she asked the board for permission to work with Lansing Superintendent Marty Kobza on addressing the issues.
She said she met with Kobza twice between December and January to “talk about what’s going on, what policies and procedures we have in place to support him and providing a safe learning environment and what he thought might need to change, and then we could write a draft a response from the board to the public to let them know that we are aware of the situation, we’re addressing it, and then just reaffirm our commitment to a safe learning environment.”
At the January meeting, Workman said she proposed a motion to summarize the policies and procedures regarding student violence, but it was defeated.
The draft “safety directive” stated “no student will be allowed to interfere with the learning opportunities of others,” and “no student will be allowed to interfere with the teacher’s responsibility to teach all students” as well as “parents have a responsibility to ensure their child’s behaviors do not take away from a safe and positive learning environment for others.”
“I was primarily trying to get the board to issue a formal response to the series of safety and discipline issues brought to us by several teachers and parents over the past 14 months,” Workman said. “We answer to the public, and the public asked the board for a response on this issue.”
Workman said two new board members asked to table the measure and move it to a work session for discussion, but Superintendent Marty Kobza interjected, asking them not to add it to an upcoming session about board policies.
Lansing board member Pete Im was apparently concerned about potential “administrative burdens.“I believe he also stated he did not want to legally obligate ourselves to anything that was in this document,” Workman said. “I pushed back and said, once again, it’s already policy, it’s already law, and it’s already things that have been implemented. This is really just reaffirming our commitment, acknowledging to the parents, hey, we see what’s going on.”
Workman said she can’t definitively say why the measure didn’t pass.
“I sought input everywhere. To draft the formal response I was proposing the board adopt, I wanted to be able to point to an objective standard(s) that exists for preserving a safe learning environment,” she said. “So I completed a review of district policy, relevant state statutes, and the district’s published belief statements on student safety and discipline. I spoke with parents, teachers, and met with the superintendent to understand the measures he’d already put in place to meet the obligations set by policy and the law, and then I summarized everything into one document. I provided the draft to the superintendent and incorporated his feedback before presenting it to the board.
Lansing district failed to report student safety and discipline data as required in board policy
Additionally, in April of last year, the board voted unanimously to adopt a “Student Safety and Discipline” policy that required the administration to provide the board with “student safety and discipline data” three times a year.
Each report is supposed to include districtwide data, trends, and building-level context for the following categories:
- Incident reports and/or complaints related to safety or security
- Reports of bullying or harassment, including racial, sexual, and disability-based harassment
- Focus room and SBS room usage
- Disciplinary referrals involving violence, weapons, or threats
- Incidents of criminal activity on district grounds (including vandalism, theft, drugs, vaping/smoking, and alcohol-related incidents)
- Attendance rates and chronic absenteeism
- Classroom evacuations, including:
- Number of evacuations
- Average response time (length of time from the initial call for assistance to responder arrival)
- Total instructional time lost
“That was approved in April of 2025, but I kept asking, ‘When are we going to get this report? When are we going to talk about this?'” Workman said. “So, (she asked) probably three times between April and November of 2025, and it got morphed into something different. We got one presentation on physical security, like how they were going to secure the doors and things like that.”
Workman said she filed a Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) request for the report and was told by “legal” that they didn’t have to provide the information because it didn’t exist in “one document” and that KORA doesn’t require the district “create a record.”
The Sentinel contacted Kobza via email, asking what was being done to address student violence, if law enforcement had ever been called after an incident, and if there were any policy changes needed to address the issue.
As of publication, Kobza has not responded.
Power struggles in Lansing
Workman doesn’t know why the majority of the Lansing school board won’t enforce existing discipline policies to protect students and teachers, but there’s good reason to suspect that the motivation is partisan politics.
Dave Trabert, CEO of the Sentinel’s owner, Kansas Policy Institute, says superintendent Kobza has a pattern of animosity against board members like Workman who are not subservient to the administration.
“The Lansing school board choosing to prioritize ‘administrative burden’ over student and teacher safety epitomizes AJ Crabill’s wise observation: student outcomes won’t change until adult behaviors change. I’m sure the other board members share Workman’s safety concerns, but it seems their fear of defying Kobza’s wishes is outweighing their obligation to provide a safe learning environment.
“This is the same superintendent who spent $20,000 without board authorization to have an attorney investigate an alleged complaint against another board member, Amy Cawvey, a friend of Workman’s who also wasn’t afraid to stand up for students. Kobza refused to show Cawvey the complaint, which was magically dropped a couple of days after she lost her re-election bid last November. Cawvey believes Kozba’s action was intended to remove her from the board, and his actions certainly lend credence to that assumption.
“I think most Kansas superintendents embrace the state’s constitutional structure that has the superintendent reporting to an elected school board, but some, like Kobza, chafe at not having absolute control. Fewer than half of students in Lansing are proficient in reading and math, and the Lansing board members shouldn’t allow power struggles, disciplinary issues, or anything else to impede efforts to resolve that crisis.”
