By Tom White
It looks like the lawmakers in Olympia have finally passed a budget. This came after a third special session, and it’s still not completely clear that they’re finished, since they haven’t decided how to handle the fact that they aren’t fully funding Initiative 1351. But let’s look at it anyway.
First the good: the budget spends an additional $47 million on Early Learning. Actually, I don’t even consider that “spending.” I call it investing. Whenever I visit my kindergarten-teacher friend (she keeps chocolate in her closet) she points out exactly which kids went to a decent preschool. They’re the ones who read and do math. The others are still learning their letters and numbers. Not surprisingly, when I get them as fourth graders, the differences are still apparent. Spending on early learning is incredibly important, and it pays off.
Speaking of kindergarten, the budget spends $180 million on full-day kindergarten, phased in over two years. That’s another big deal. In addition, they spent $350 million to lower K-3 class sizes. No matter how you look at it, $530 more million dollars for K-3 education is not couch change, and I’m grateful for this increase. It will pay off. My only concern is where they’re planning to put those new classrooms. My school, like most, is already crowded with more portables and outbuildings than a North Carolina mink farm.
Although high school students were pretty much left untouched, college students (and their parents) scored. The budget lowers tuition by 15-20% over the next two years, making it cheaper for the kids who grow up in Washington to actually go to college in Washington. In my own family, we found it cheaper to send our son to school in Texas than to Central Washington University. Four thousand dollars a year cheaper. It was time for someone to address college costs, and I’m glad they did. I just wish they’d done it sooner.
And finally, those of us teaching got a nice pay bump. The budget spends $152 million to raise our salary by 4.8% over the next two years, mostly by funding this year’s I-732 COLA. It also increases spending on teacher health care coverage by $24 million.
Now the bad: Initiative 1351 was supposed to lower class sizes across the entire grade span. Not just K-3. I teach 4th grade, but I’ve taught third grade for many years, and trust me, nothing magical happens to kids when they turn nine that instantly makes them better able to handle being in a larger class. I’m glad at least some classes are getting smaller – it’s better than nothing – but I wish they could all go down.
And remember that 4.8% pay raise from two paragraphs ago? Turns out only 3% is permanent. The other 1.8% (1.2% next year and 0.6% the following year) go away after two years. The WEA refers to it as a “tip,” which seems accurate. As bad as this looks now, it’s going to look and feel a lot worse two years from now, when it’s going to feel sort of like a pay cut. Because that’s what it’ll be.
And the Disappointing: The State Supreme Court essentially told the lawmakers to change the way they fund schools. Currently the state sends enough to each district to cover “basic education” for each student. But there’s a huge difference in what the state considers “basic” and what students actually receive. Basic education, according to the State, does not include many specialists, learning support teachers, and other personnel that pretty much every student has come to expect when they go to school. The difference between what the State pays for and what students actually receive is made up by local levies.
Levies were originally designed to enable schools to supplement the basic education funded by the state with “extra” services that districts and their voters decide are important enough to pay for. But over the years, districts have come to rely on local levies to essentially pay for those basic services that the state won’t pay for. Consider, for example, that 4.8% salary bump. As a fourth grade teacher, my bump comes from the state. My friend the PE teacher, however, gets the same bump, but it has to come from the district, which comes from local levies. Not surprisingly, there’s a huge disparity between affluent districts and the money they raise through levies, and poor districts and the money they don’t raise through levies. This, in a nutshell, was what the McCleary decision was supposed to address. And the lawmakers did not address it. It’s disappointing, but frankly, not surprising.
Someday they’ll solve that issue. Maybe one of those three-year-olds, with her top-notch early learning, will move into an all-day kindergarten and then pass through super low class sizes and on into an affordable in-state college and eventually grow up smart enough to figure it all out.
But until then, we’ll take what we can get.