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Title : McCleary and Funding Updates
link : McCleary and Funding Updates
McCleary and Funding Updates
There was a very good discussion at KUOW today between Daniel Zavala, director of policy and government relations with the League of Education Voters and Summer Stinson of Washington's Paramount Duty about the Legislature's funding of public education.Zavala says the Legislature made "significant moves toward structural inequities" across the state and says this budget provides $7.3M in "additional funds." I don't even need Summer to chime in before I call BS on that one. We had a recession, remember? So districts had to make deep cuts and those cuts have only been slowly backfilled. How is that new money?
But take it away, Summer.
She says that some those funds are just replacing dollars from local levies (already approved). She added that the plaintiffs lawyer puts the real cost of fulfilling McCleary at $5B per year. She cites the Legislature's own number of $1.15B this budget just to enact the K-3 class size reductions (which are part of McCleary and which the Legislature could not ignore as they did 1351).
Zavala says the ruling said the funding streams had to be "regular and dependable" (as levies are not). That's a fine point except that Senator Jamie Pedersen says this method of funding via a state property tax will be capped at 1% around 2020. Meaning, it won't be keeping up with inflation and, he believes, will place the Legislature where they were at the start of this session in just a couple of years, having to figure out how to fund schools.
There is also a great op-ed by former legislator, Larry Seaquist, in The News Tribune. (bold mine)
We’ll need some time to fully map the consequences of the back-room deals hidden inside the new budgets. But make no mistake: way before legislators teed up a final budget this week, their delay and drama had already inflicted major damage to our state."miniaturizing McCleary" - I love that phrase.
Each year around 24% of our high school students drop out. A recent study by our state’s major business leaders calculated that in this year alone, some 8,300 seniors quit before June graduation. Our legislators could have cut that in half had they fully staffed our state’s public high schools with the teachers, text books, computers and counselors required by the legislature’s own yardsticks.
Our teachers are dropping out, too. Radically underpaid, treated as pawns, not professionals, many thousands of our dedicated educators hang it up every year. Result: a full scale, state-wide teacher shortage. Every day our legislators were paying themselves per diem to go to work nearly every school district in the state was scrambling to fill empty teacher slots.
If education is the main engine of our state’s economy, we’re getting many “check engine” warning lights. No one thrives when we leave so many kids behind or trap so many college students so deep in debt. No one thrives when our teachers abandon their calling.
But rather than strategizing how to expand and update our whole system of public schools—especially including our colleges and advanced skill centers—our legislators preoccupy themselves with miniaturizing “McCleary,” hunting for the smallest possible school budget with the smallest possible increase in taxes to pay for it.
McCleary will never really be fixed until it is fixed in public. If our state is to continue as one of the world’s leading high tech, high skills economies, if all our youth are to have an opportunity to share that future, then today’s voters need to be let back into the decisions about our schools.The Times is reported that "a last minute tax cut to help Washington manufacturers" got little notice. WPD says the number of tax breaks to companies now numbers over 700.
WPD's tweet on Sped funding: the State has a moral obligation to fund Sped. SPS pays $60M special ed. WA will only cover $16M. SPS shortfall=$44M
Stinson explains to KUOW that there was a cap on Sped funding (awful in itself) but they raised that cap BUT also said no funding of Sped from levies so that funding source is now cut off. Hence that shortfall. Ditto on ELL. Ditto on transportation. She says that SPS will have to make hard choices.
Zavala admits this budget may not be the "final answer" and there is still work to do. But while districts slog thru that work, what happens and who will bear the brunt of these fixes?
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